There are mornings when the world feels slightly askew, as though the axis has shifted overnight while one was dreaming of more certain things. The coffee mug is just where it was left, the light falls familiarly through the mullioned glass, and yet—something is different. I am older. Or the world is. Or both.
Change, I’ve come to believe, is not merely the backdrop of life—it is the very stage upon which our lines are delivered, often rewritten between acts. And transitions—those in-between spaces—are the dim corridors where we wait for the next scene, uncertain whether to rehearse or simply breathe.
In my younger years, I fancied change as adventure. The thrill of departure, the page yet unwritten. But time—and the gentle erosion it brings—has taught me that change, more often than not, is an exercise in relinquishment. One lets go, not always boldly, but with the quiet dignity of one who has learned that clinging is more exhausting than surrender.
I have stood in doorways, literally and metaphorically, feeling the pull of what was and the whisper of what might be. The hallway between jobs, between homes, between identities—these are not just practical matters. They are soulful spaces. And they ache, sometimes.
The secret, if I may be so bold as to share it, is not in resisting the change, nor in pretending it doesn’t sting. No. It is in learning to sit still in the flux. To pour the coffee, read the poem, walk the dog—even while the scaffolding of your certainties is being quietly dismantled.
There is grace in this. A sort of hidden curriculum, if you will, in which the heart learns resilience, and the spirit discovers its own quiet agility. What once felt like being unmoored begins, astonishingly, to resemble freedom.
And so, one learns to hold things lightly. Friendships, titles, ambitions—even one’s own ideas of self. Not out of cynicism, but from the growing awareness that all of it is a gift, and none of it is guaranteed.
Coping, then, is not so much a strategy as a posture. A willingness to keep showing up, to keep listening, to trust that even the most bewildering transitions may carry us—however circuitously—toward some deeper becoming.
Perhaps the wisest thing we can do in times of upheaval is to become very quiet. To light a candle. To read Rilke aloud. To write a letter we may never send. To remember that even amidst the whirlwind, the soul is not lost, only asked to grow.
And in time, as the dust settles, we find ourselves once again standing in a room warmed by sunlight, with the familiar clink of the mug and the steam curling up from the cup. Changed, yes—but still here. Still becoming.
