Walking into the Unknown

I wrote this during COVID, it seems relevant in these turbulent times.

Walking into the Unknown

In the small hours, the discomfort of the unknown overtakes me.

The world has become unrecognizable. The familiar structures of our lives have fallen away, and my mind tries to compress fear, grief, and spirit into something manageable, something that will quiet me, something that will make the discomfort disappear.

I want the familiar patterns of my old life back.

But I know the comfort of the familiar can be dangerous. It can return us too quickly to lives we had stopped questioning.

Still, I have nowhere to land.

Around me, voices cry out:

Jesus will save us.

Science will save us.

Our leaders will save us.

We wait to be rescued, believing there can be no peace until the danger has passed and the old world has been restored.

But beneath our certainty lives another fear:

What if nothing can save us?

What if the world we knew is not coming back?

Then dawn arrives.

The sun rises and paints the low clouds pink and gold. For a moment, I am drawn away from thoughts of myself, away from contagion and survival, and into the mystery of creation.

I walk.

I walk until the sense of standing upon the landscape falls away and is replaced by the sense that I belong to it.

I walk until fear of the unknown begins to loosen, until the unknown becomes not only a threat, but an opening.

It pushes me to imagine, to experiment, to live differently.

It asks me to examine my beliefs, my habits, and the world I had accepted without question.

It asks what might be built differently when the old patterns no longer hold.

The unknown draws me back into light and water, breath and blood, death and renewal. It reminds me that life is older and larger than fear.

Billions of years ago, we were conceived by sea and earth, by air and sun. Salt in our blood, minerals in our bones, breath passing between our lungs and the trees.

We do not need the old world to return to be whole. Life does not promise us safety, nor does it promise a return to what was.

It offers us morning, another beginning, and the quiet chance to build something more decent, more humane, and more generous than what came before.

The unknown is not asking us to be unafraid.

It is asking us to keep walking.