What If We Learned to Stop Predicting?

A soft unraveling of the human need to know and how it keeps us from truly seeing dogs.

What if we stopped predicting not because we knew what would happen, but because we allowed ourselves not to?

Prediction is often just us wearing a thinking hat. And when we lead with overthinking, we miss what’s right in front of us.

The illusion of certainty

Humans are brilliant at imagining. I know this well. For me, prediction often fed anxiety. I believed thinking would calm me; if I could anticipate every why and how, I’d be safe. It worked, in part. But sometimes to a fault.

The more I tried to think my way through everything, the less I listened: to myself, and to the world around me.

We predict behavior, emotions, even needs before they arrive. It feels safe, like we are prepared. But in doing so, we create more questions instead of witnessing the answers already in front of us.

Dogs don’t live that way. They experience. They notice. They move.

When we guess instead of witness, we build a wall.

One clouded with “sunny with a chance of prediction.” We stack the bricks with our strengths, what we hold dear, so that we can move through the world with answers. Yet without mortar, even the strongest wall will not hold.

And yet, when I stopped chasing certainty, I began to notice something else…

Presence offers insight

I didn’t name it at first, but I knew when it happened: moments where a dog and I were in full presence. No next step. No desired outcome. Just a shared moment.

Back then, it was breath and stillness, not trying to control anything. With that, there was no anxiety. Just the moment itself.

It looked like “nothing” to many. But it was everything to us. A quiet letting go of my need to constantly predict behavior, outcomes, and responses.

Why prediction creates a mismatch

Prediction assumes sameness: “This behavior means X. If I am this way, they will be that way.”

But dogs aren’t formulas. They are rhythms, and they invite us to join their beats.

What soothed them yesterday might overwhelm them today. What looks like fear this morning may be joy by nightfall. When we predict, we flatten complexity. Dogs feel that.

A real moment

This became clearest in the shelter, where every dog carried a story and where prediction wanted to rush in the loudest.

Barking. Lunging. Pacing. The urge to fix, solve, rewire.

It’s tempting to label, to explain, to predict what lies underneath. But labels carry forward like shadows; they are not whole. Instead, I began setting the stories aside.

I sat with them as they were, without rushing the walk, without correcting the noise, without shaping the moment into something else, just sitting as a witness.

And slowly, the barking stopped. The pacing paused. Dogs sat. They observed. They processed. Then they lay down. Some even fell asleep in the forest.

Not because I did anything. But because I stayed long enough for them to rest, without being propelled into what prediction might have demanded.

The invitation

Dogs already know how to be.

It’s we who wrestle with the unknown.

But if we can loosen our grip on the answers and take time to smooth the mortar around the bricks, we may begin to notice something beyond prediction.

Not what we expected. Not what we planned. But perhaps what was needed all along.

And in that space, we discover it.

Not by knowing, but by being.