Stepping Back to See Forward

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

— Annie Dillard

What is it with the crooked lines that insert themselves into our days? The kind that ask us to stop rather than move forward.

Not dramatically enough for others to notice, but just enough to disrupt our rhythm and remind us that time has a logic of its own.

When this kind of time arrives with turbulence, the instinct is to push through it, to figure it out, to speed up our pace until the interruption moves out of the way.

But not all challenges give in to our efforts. Some require us to become quiet and deliberately step back. An unwelcome standstill. A sort of letting-be.

Standing still does not mean giving up. It is not retreat or resignation. It is creating just enough distance for time to move ahead of us. The kind of pause that allows for more clarity when we eventually look forward.

When time moves ahead in this way, it often softens the edges of what felt sharp just moments before. The immediate weather of our surroundings—the fog, a squall, a sudden chop in the water—moves forward without our having to chase after it.

For this to work, we need a landscape inside of us that can hold the waiting. A terrain built before the turbulence arrived: ritual, slowness, curiosity, presence, and the small comforts that make life feel like it belongs to us.

Without this inner architecture, stillness can feel like stagnation. With it, stillness becomes orientation.

Looking forward is not always an invitation to transform ourselves. Sometimes forward is simply what is already familiar. The same spaces. The same habits. The same dogs at our side. Only now with a slightly broader view.

It feels comfortable again, perhaps even more than before, because we held our ground and let time do its work.

There is a quiet faith in holding still long enough to see where we are headed. A faith that allows us to notice the things that made us who we are and gives life permission to settle back into itself sooner rather than later.

Sometimes we just have to step back and let time take the lead.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

— Marcel Proust

Talk soon,

G