Look at Where We Are, Look at Where We Started

What do you do when everything is changing? Right now, my life is undergoing massive change - I am finding my space in my Baha'i community, my husband is immigrating to Canada from the States soon (tomorrow!), everything feels full of promise and uncertainty and joy and confusion. It's intimidating, a little, not always knowing where to put your feet down or what your tomorrow might look like. It's a lot to take in, and a lot to adjust to.

I am this amazing mix of absolute joy and utter terror, all at once. I'm not great at change, I don't like when my routines are disrupted, I am worried that I won't be able to make everything work. And it's hard sometimes, to sit with that. I bounce from delight to shaking fear, and I have no answers. I can't tell myself how any of this is going to go.

So how do you cope? How do you find a space to breathe amid all of the changes life is so fond of throwing at us, both good and bad? As Abdu'l-Baha reminds us, "now the new age is here and creation is reborn. Humanity hath taken on new life. The autumn hath gone by, and the reviving spring is here. All things are now made new". Life is made of change. Flowers bloom and die, seasons change, change is everywhere. 

Baha’u’llah urges us to “Let each morn be better than its eve and each morrow richer than its yesterday.” I try, now, to see if I can't frame my changes that way - how do they make the next day better? If they don't make the day better, because they're not good changes, how can I maybe make a tiny good change to make things a little better? Shoghi Effendi reminds us that "He urges you to persevere and add up your accomplishments, rather than to dwell on the dark side of things. Everyone's life has both a dark and bright side. " We just have to try to find the good stuff, however small, amid all the things that might seem impossible scary hard.

Tonight, it's easy. Tonight, I will (eventually, maybe, hopefully) get some sleep, and tomorrow my day will be better because for the first time, I will get to pick my husband up from the airport and I won't have to give him back for a long time. Tonight I am just sitting with this not knowing what the next day or the next day or the next day is going to look like, because I know some important things - I know the feel of my husband's arms around me as he hugs me tight, I know we will talk through the hard things and the simple things, I know that we have survived all of the days that have taken us to this point. It's not going to be perfect, but it will be ours - my husband and I will figure out what our lives look like together, one moment at at time. There will be love and joy and prayer and tears and questions and everything in between.

It's gonna be okay.