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Three years ago, I took a picture from the window of a plane. The sky was on fire, and the clouds looked like they knew something I didn’t. Everyone around me was indifferent, but I couldn’t stop looking out. I thought I was flying toward a new life, and the sky felt on my side.
I had packed my boxes with the kind of hope that looks like confidence. I told myself this move, this leap, would be the beginning of something clear, something solid. I believed in myself more than ever.
But beginnings are strange things. They rarely feel like what they are.
We imagine them as doors swinging open, moments of clarity, brave leaps and obvious turning points. But more often, they arrive quietly. They sneak in through the back door, disguised as waiting, confusion, or the slow discomfort of nothing happening.
When I left the city that had shaped me for a decade, I thought I would land somewhere new and instantly feel like I’d arrived. I thought new beginnings meant feeling ready. Instead, I landed in stillness.
At first, I fought it. I filled my days with plans, tasks, distractions, anything that could make me feel in motion again. I’ve always been good at doing. I know how to fix, to organise, to make things move forward. How to keep myself busy. But this was different. Life wasn’t asking me to move. It was asking me to stop.
That’s the part no one tells you about change: that before something begins, something else must end. And endings are rarely tidy. There’s a stretch of in-between that feels like standing in fog, unsure which way is forward. Uncertain which way is right.
In that fog, all my confidence went quiet. I wasn’t sure who I was without the structure of the life I had left. Job titles, reputation, routines, and identities that once felt certain all dissolved mid-air. It felt like losing gravity.
So I started small. A cup of coffee in the morning. A walk with no destination. Naming the season I was in, even when I didn’t like it.
Some days, that was the only thing I could do: stay. Breathe. Wait.
I began to understand that stillness isn’t the absence of movement, it’s the space where something unseen is forming. Like roots growing in the dark. The dark was a place to be. You don’t see progress, but it’s happening.
There’s courage in standing still. It takes a different kind of strength, not the bold kind, but the steady, inward one. The kind that lets you sit with uncertainty without running from it.
When people say trust the process, I think this is what they mean, not blind optimism, but a slow willingness to stay long enough for life to show you what it’s making of you.
Over time, the stillness softened. The fog lifted, not all at once, but slowly, like morning light finding its way through half-closed blinds. One day, I realised I was no longer waiting for the “real beginning” to arrive. I was already in it.
It didn’t look like a grand entrance. It looked like waking up a little more present. It looked like learning to belong to the ordinary days, the ones that don’t announce themselves as milestones, but quietly hold your becoming.
Now, when I feel the pull to rush into the next thing, to fill the space just so I don’t feel the emptiness, I remember those early mornings. The coffee cup was warm in my hands. The quiet buzz of uncertainty. The reminder that stillness is not failure.
Because the truth is: beginnings often look nothing like we expect.
They might look like packing boxes, or saying goodbye, or sitting in a half-empty room, unsure what comes next. They might look like burnout or grief, like the loss of direction or the end of certainty. They might look like waiting or not knowing.
And yet, in those quiet spaces, something begins.
Maybe that’s the hardest part: to believe that you can become someone new even when nothing seems to move. That the pause is not punishment, but preparation. That you can hold both the ache of what’s gone and the small promise of what’s coming and still be exactly where you need to be.
I wish I could say I’ve fully arrived, but I haven’t. I’m still somewhere in that fog, learning to let it be part of the landscape instead of something to escape. Maybe this is what the middle of becoming feels like, both a pause and a pulse. A place where I’m still finding my footing, yet somehow more at peace with not knowing.
So if you’re there now, standing in between what was and what’s next, I hope you remember this:
Sometimes beginnings don’t look like doors opening.
Sometimes they look like a warm cup of coffee and the courage to be still for one more day.
Stand still.
It’s okay.
Published on Substack on October 27, 2025
https://mindandbecoming.substack.com/
