On Being Humbled Into Joy

Notes from the Hollow Bone | entry forty-one

Sometimes the messages that return to us are not new.

They are seeds planted years earlier, waiting for the right season to break open.

I remember a young man once telling me something that stayed with me long after the conversation itself had faded.

If he could tell his mother one thing, he said, it would be this:

put yourself in uncomfortable places.

Do the thing that unsettles you.
Step toward what you do not yet know.
Try it.

At the time, I carried the words without fully understanding them.

Only later did I realize I had already begun living them.

Again and again, I found myself stepping into places where certainty could not follow me.

A solo trip.
A different coast.
A stretch of days where the old version of me no longer quite fit.

Then another unfamiliar season.
And another.

Sometimes by choice.
Sometimes by circumstance.
Sometimes by a strange inner knowing that I was meant to keep moving.

Looking back, I see now that it was never really about the places.

It was about what those places were asking of me.

They were asking me to release the one thing I had clung to most:

control.

Control over what came next.
Control over how life should look.
Control over timing, outcome, and certainty.

I did not know how tightly I had been holding everything until life began gently — and sometimes not so gently — prying my fingers loose.

And in that loosening, something unexpected happened.

Peace entered.

Not the kind that comes from having all the answers.

Not the kind that comes from finally arranging life into something perfect.

A quieter peace.

The kind that arrives when surrender becomes trust.

The kind that lets a home feel like grace.
A blue jay at the window feel like blessing.
A quiet evening feel like abundance.

I think happiness found me only after I stopped trying to manage how it should arrive.

Only after I let myself be humbled enough to receive it in smaller, truer forms.

A breath.
A stillness.
A room of my own.
A life no longer ruled by the need to control every next step.

Perhaps joy had been waiting all along.

Not outside the unknown.

But within it.

With Grace & Ink,

Mai