You don't have to know what comes next

01When Nothing Is Certain

A lot of us are closing doors right now.

Maybe you’re packing up a home you lived in for decades. Maybe someone you love is moving across the country, or leaving a career they worked so hard for, or getting ready to leave this life altogether. It feels like it’s happening everywhere at once.

You can be ready to move on and still feel tender about what you’re leaving. An ordinary moment brings it all back. You find something you’d forgotten about, or you remember who you were when it all began, and suddenly moving forward carries more emotion than you expected.

There’s room for all of that. Tenderness carries the imprint of what you loved. Something sacred was lived there. We can get so focused on getting through a transition that we forget to honor what was there, including the version of ourselves who lived inside it. Even when we’re relieved to leave, something meaningful may still be asking to be felt.

Once an experience is over, it’s gone. We carry the memories and the feelings, but we can’t go back and live it again. And the soul knows when it’s time to move on. Somewhere along the way, we got uncomfortable in our comfort. The familiar is still familiar, but it doesn’t feel right anymore. A deeper part of us is already responding to a life we haven’t met yet.

02Nothing Was Ever Certain

That can be unsettling, especially when the next chapter hasn’t introduced itself. We want to know where we’re going before we let ourselves leave.

But look at the life you’ve already lived. How much of it did you actually know in advance?

You made plans. You chose people. You committed to things that felt real and important. Some unfolded beautifully, and some changed in ways you never could have imagined. We assume a marriage will last forever, or that the people we love will always be a short drive away. We live on a very fine thread, and most days we forget it’s there.

There has always been uncertainty. We just had stretches of life when it was easier to forget.

You’ve already lived through so many tomorrows you didn’t know how to meet. Take that in. Remember the times you found your footing, the person who showed up to help, the answer that only arrived once you were living the question. There’s experience in you that deserves your trust.

And there’s mystery in how those moments came together. The conversation that reached you at exactly the right time. The door that opened out of nowhere. You could never have arranged it with your mind, and yet you recognized it the moment it arrived. I’ve come to know the divine through encounters like those. They’ve taught me to leave room for an intelligence far greater than anything I can plan.

It’s exhausting to believe you have to anticipate every possible difficulty before you can feel at ease. You can spend a whole day bracing for a future that never shows up while the life that’s actually here keeps asking for your attention.

Here’s the gift hidden in all that uncertainty. One of my favorite quotes says, “When nothing is certain, everything is possible.”

03Find the Eye of the Storm

We’ll never live outside the chaos. The universe itself was born from it. There are over eight billion of us walking around as our own little tornadoes, and every one of us is spinning through something.

It makes sense to fear chaos. It’s a powerful force. But I believe the same divine intelligence that created the calm also created the storm. God is in both.

So we don’t try to control it. Think about a rip current. If you swim straight against it, you’ll wear yourself out. If you let it carry you around, it brings you back where you need to be.

Your work is to find the eye of the storm, that still place in the center, and live from there. The winds will keep blowing. You just stop living in the winds.

And trust that you’ll always land exactly where you’re supposed to be. Even the day we land somewhere beyond this body, we’ll be right where we’re meant to be.

04Everything Moves in Cycles

Nature keeps showing us this. The grass grows back right after you cut it. The trees fill out with leaves and then let every one of them go.

Our homes, our relationships, and our bodies all move through seasons of birth and rebirth. Some things run their full course for reasons we’ll never understand from here. Where our light goes after this life, we have visions and hopes. I talk with loved ones on the other side and with my guides all the time. But it’s still a sacred mystery.

So what if you don’t know anything at all?

You’ve always known what you needed to know along the way.

05Your Soul Bought the Ticket

Remember begging to ride the big roller coaster as a kid? Everyone on it looked like they were having the time of their lives. Then you got on, it hit the first loop, and all you could think was, “Get me the hell out of here.”

Then it stopped, you climbed out, and a minute later you said, “That was intense. I want to go again.”

I think that’s the soul coming into a human body. It chose the ride. Some part of you knew exactly what it was signing up for.

06Hope Is Creation Energy

What keeps us going on the ride is hope.

Hope is sacred. It’s the alchemy that turns what we wish for into what shows up. You hoped for children one day, and there they are. You hoped to be loved, and people came. You hoped to feel free, and you’ve tasted freedom along the way.

You don’t have to be working in the woodshed for hope to create. Carrying the hope is the creating. We don’t always have the details. We have a sense of what we’d love to experience, and we start making room for it.

Sometimes hope takes us through its opposite for a while so we can know it more deeply. Try describing a rainbow to someone who’s never seen color. Without contrast, there’s nothing to compare it to. Even atheists pray in foxholes. Something in us knows there’s a greater love holding us, even at our most desperate.

Disappointment teaches us to be careful about wanting anything too much. We grow calluses around the places that hurt, and we get very good at protecting ourselves. Eventually we notice how much effort those protections take, and how little room they leave for anything new to reach us.

It’s okay to hope again, even while part of you is afraid. You can be wise about your choices and still let yourself want something beautiful. You can take your time. You can ask for support.

07What Are You Bringing?

We usually walk into a new chapter wondering what it will give us. Will this place make me happy? Will this relationship help me feel loved?

There’s another question worth sitting with. How can I contribute to the experience I’m hoping to have?

If I want warmth, where can I offer it? If I want connection, where am I willing to be available? What would happen if I brought a little of the enthusiasm I’ve been waiting for life to hand me?

We’re in relationship with creation. What we offer becomes part of what takes shape around us. The relationships we nurture become places we can land when we’re tired. And we get to receive too. Some days, someone else gets to hold the hope for a while.

08Every Dark Season Has a Shelf Life

When you’ve been lonely or grieving for years, calling it “temporary” can feel like a joke.

But every hard season has a shelf life. It comes in waves. When the real release finally comes, the kind where you can breathe again, that timing is between you and God.

And once you’ve lived through something, it becomes part of you. So stop trying to cut it out. Tell it, “You’re a part of me now. You don’t get to run the show, and I’m not afraid of you anymore. I welcome your tenderness. I welcome the wisdom and the power you’ve been holding for me all along.”

Remember that ignorance is just a fragment of love, split off for a while so we can understand love more fully. Once it catches even a spark of light, it’s changed forever.

09What an Honor

Years ago, a former partner went through cancer. She was in terrible pain, afraid of dying, fighting to stay. I lay beside her every night, holding space and feeling helpless in my own way.

Somewhere in it, I realized what an honor it was that the divine chose me to walk through that with her. I couldn’t change what she was going through. But I could be the one she leaned into when life was at its hardest. What a privilege that was.

I came to know a particular kind of hopelessness: wanting so badly to ease the pain and fear of someone I loved, and not knowing how. That became part of me. And alongside the grief, I carry what love made possible in those moments.

My light didn’t go out. It got stronger, even though I didn’t feel strong. Something in me kept living and loving, and eventually it found its way to other people. Now I get to carry that as hope.

10Once Love Is Given

Once love is given, it can never be taken away.

Circumstances change. People leave. Chapters close. You still carry the ways that love touched you. It’s become part of your consciousness, part of how the divine has made itself known through your life.

So let yourself draw from it now. Think of all the kindness you’ve received, the moments someone saw you clearly, and the care that reached you when you didn’t know how to ask for it. What might that make possible in the way you treat yourself today?

11When Your Hope Runs Low

There will be days when you can’t find hope in yourself. On those days, go borrow some. Find someone who’s carrying it and sit near their light for a while.

Angeles Arrien shared a teaching about four sources of nourishment for the spirit: dancing, singing, storytelling, and silence. In her telling, a healer would ask someone who felt disheartened when they had stopped making room for these experiences.

When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did stories, especially your own, stop awakening your curiosity? When did silence stop feeling like a place you could rest?

These questions invite us to notice where we’ve lost contact with what makes us feel alive. Somewhere along the way, we may have gotten so busy managing life that we stopped letting ourselves be moved by it. Our voice got quieter. Our body had fewer chances to express itself. Wonder slipped out of our days.

There’s something deeply restorative about making room for those experiences again. A song can reach a feeling we haven’t been able to name. Movement can give that feeling somewhere to go. A story can remind us there’s still more to discover. And silence can hold us while all of it settles.

If you can’t dance, watch someone dance and let it move you. If you can’t sing, listen to a voice that touches you. Begin wherever you can feel even a small opening. Keep putting yourself near what nourishes you, and there will come a moment when something in you responds and you remember it’s still yours.

Those moments bring us back to the eye of the storm, a place where we can feel ourselves again, even while life around us stays unsettled. We remember that we belong to something vast and mysterious, even in the middle of an ordinary day.

12Be the Fool

You can be the one who knows everything and suffers under the weight of it. Or you can be the fool who admits he doesn’t know, lives fully anyway, and somehow always lands exactly where he needs to be. The fool always seems to find shelter and food and good company.

The fool has lived long enough to know plans change, and he still has the courage to be curious. There’s wisdom in being able to say, “I know some things. There’s still so much I don’t know.” That openness leaves room for life to show you its magic.

If you’ve always been the responsible one, the one who has to know, the one who notices what might go wrong, maybe you’ve done it long enough. Nobody is asking you to carry all of it. Can you risk not knowing? Can you let the dinner happen even if the china doesn’t match? Can you enjoy something before you’ve figured out whether it will last?

How many times have things not gone as planned and still worked out?

So when love reaches you today, let it arrive fully. Don’t put a stopper on it. Give the kind message a moment. Receive the invitation. Don’t say “why me” or “it’s too much.” Say yes. Thank you. More. Then let it ripple into everything you do.

That love is your real experience of this world. Let it carry some weight in how you imagine tomorrow.

You may be standing between something you loved and something you can’t yet see. Let there be tenderness there, and let there be curiosity. Take the next step with what you know today, and leave room to be met by something you haven’t imagined yet.

And stay hopeful. It was your hope that carried you into the knowing of your faith. One can’t live without the other. When hope and faith move together, each one feeding the other, that’s your direct experience of God. That’s your direct relationship with the divine, and it’s real.