What If We Stayed Curious Instead of Certain?
Inspired by Sara Bareilles’ UCLA commencement address
Singer-songwriter and actress Sara Bareilles recently gave a heartfelt and deeply moving commencement speech to UCLA’s Class of 2025. It wasn’t your typical feel-good graduation talk. Instead of tidy answers or easy inspiration, she offered something uncommonly honest and vulnerably wise: a call to meet uncertainty with radical curiosity and courage—a message for anyone standing at the edge of what’s known, trying to stay human in a fractured world.
That message hit home for me—particularly given the state of our nation and world.
Sara started by sharing a story about one of her dearest friends, Broadway actor Gavin Creel, who sadly passed away last year. In what they didn’t know would be the final year of his life, Gavin tattooed the word both on his wrist—a personal mantra drawn from a poem he found on a greeting card:
“Everything is both wonderful and terrible, boring and exciting.
It’s okay that it’s both obvious and hidden, simple and complicated.
What a relief that everything can be both—
Light and dark, celebratory and melancholy.”
At first, Sara admitted she didn’t love the tattoo. But watching Gavin live out its meaning changed her mind. He modeled something radical in a culture obsessed with certainty: the art of holding complexity. She went on to say:
“Two things can be true at the same time. In fact, they often are.
More nuance, everywhere.”
In a world addicted to black-and-white thinking, where is nuance truly exalted and honored? Most of us live our lives not in the absolutes, but in the messy gray—in the contradictions, the doubts, the unknowns and the in-betweens. And if we’re being honest, it’s in that gray space where most of our real growth happens.
The Fire of Becoming
Actually, life is more than black or white—or even gray. It’s technicolor. Multilayered. Full of contradiction and contrast. To be alive is to navigate the full spectrum: discomfort, uncertainty, heartbreak, beauty, and joy—sometimes all in the same breath!
And when we’re willing to take it all in—rather than dodge it—it can actually be quite wondrous.
The dodging part has certainly played out in my own life. Fear and anxiety have led the way more times than I’d like to admit. I’ve avoided risks, stayed quiet, stepped out of the game, convinced I couldn’t handle the fire of engagement. But that same fire—that discomfort—is often the very thing that has fueled my transformation and growth. It helped me blossom.
Fire is creation. It’s the birth of stars, of new worlds, of possibility. The fiery explosion that created our galaxy is literally what gave birth to the matter that makes-up our cells, and our selves. That explosive, generative force is alive in each of us. But it can feel overwhelming and even scary—and when it does, many of us retreat. But as Sara aptly puts it, “fear is a fantastic indicator of a growth edge.”
Curiosity as Liberation
There are so many places where we can feel stuck. Afraid to grow into the next version of ourselves, because growth means letting go of what we’ve known. Of what can feel comfortable. And that can feel scary. But to become truly alive and thrive, we have to step into the fire of the unknown.
For me, learning to distinguish between real risk and echoes of childhood fear has been life-changing. Internal Family Systems (IFS) and other trauma-informed frameworks have helped me unpack the protective parts of myself—those inner voices that once kept me safe when I was much younger, but now can hold me back.
Curiosity and open-mindedness are often the antidote to those old patterns. They don’t demand that I have the answers. They just ask me to keep bravely searching and asking exploratory questions.
As I age, I find myself taking that leap more often. Leaning into discomfort. Trusting that what I don’t yet know might hold something vital. Choosing growth over comfort. Truth with a capitol “T” over my “certainties” that I already know. It’s not always easy, and I fumble around a lot—but it’s all so much more alive.
As Sara sings about your own inner voice in her song “Little Voice” (one of my favorites of hers),
“It’s just a little voice, and if you’re listening,
Sometimes a little voice can say the biggest things.”
We have to listen for it.
Where Do We Learn Together?
At the start of her speech, Sara spoke with remarkable honesty about the world we’re all living in right now. She acknowledged how hard it is to hold both love for the world and deep concern for where we’re headed. Despite her admiration for humanity’s potential, she admitted she’s struggling—grappling with fear, frustration, and a kind of crisis of faith in humanity.
She talked about being "deeply concerned for us—for all of us,” and how exhausting it is to witness so much cruelty, misinformation, and oversimplified outrage. The barrage of “self-righteous hot takes” and growing lack of empathy, she said, felt like a kind of emotional contagion—and at times, she found herself catching it too.
Sara spoke openly about her own recent crisis of faith—not in a higher power, but in humanity itself. It’s not the kind of thing people usually bring to a graduation podium, but that was the power of her speech: it was raw and real. And it offered a kind of solidarity in uncertainty.
“What can I say? We live on the edge,” she said. “It made me wonder if this crisis of faith is here to teach me something—that we might learn together in real time.”
That question stuck with me: What if the crisis itself is the teacher? What if the overwhelm so many of us are feeling about the state of the world isn’t something to avoid, but something to get deeply curious about? To get open-minded about.
When we silo ourselves in certainty and resist seeing things anew, we shut down the very possibilities that could lead to healing and transformation. But when we stay open—when we stay curious—we open up to the conditions for real change.
What is it we are individually and collectively missing in this great shared human story right now?
What new perspective—one that might scare us, or simply be unfamiliar—could be the very thing that saves us?
We can’t know unless we stay deeply, soulfully curious. Unless we remain open to what we haven’t yet seen. Because this world—our shared, chaotic, beautiful world—needs us awake and alive. And open. Especially right now.
“You Are Falling, Yes—But You Are Also Flying”
Sara closed her speech with a poetic and daring invitation:
“What if we can stay curious instead of certain?
For me, this practice opens a kind of parachute.
It opens the aperture of your perspective to slow down enough to see that you are falling, yes—but you are also flying.
We all are.”
She quoted poet Andrea Gibson:
“Someday we will dare to trade good for true.”
And she added something both achingly honest and bold:
“My crisis of faith in humanity might just be an invitation. An invitation to stay curious. To remember that I am humanity too. And I think to love the world—to love this exact world, with its chaos and cruelty and beauty and brilliance—is to pack your parachute, find the edge, and jump.”
And off we go, into the great unknown… Thanks Sara.
P.S. If you haven’t already, do yourself a favor and listen to her hauntingly beautiful version of Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. I’m a huge and longtime fan, and that one gives me chills every time! One amongst many great songs in her catalogue.
Matthew Albracht is the former Executive Director and a Board Member of The Peace Alliance (www.peacealliance.org), a U.S. based NGO which advocates for domestic and international peacebuilding priorities. His writings have appeared on CNN, Salon, HuffPost and other outlets.
His Substack writings explore how we heal—from the inside out and the bottom up—personally, politically, and culturally—with a particular focus on the intersections between them all. Weaving together politics, psychology, and personal growth, grounded in systems thinking and trauma-awareness.
I was a mother sitting at this commencement. It was so powerful - and yet, because of all the huge emotions of the graduates, I feel the wisdom of this speech was diluted. I've saved your piece here Matthew, for future reference with heartfelt appreciation!!
Wow. Thanks for this, Matthew!