First comes desire.

In an otherwise steady, sufficient, pleasant existence, there comes a time when you want more, perhaps want out. In the quiet space between thinking and doing, a wish, a tingling in the stomach, a nudge of the senses, a sign, if you will, presents itself. A new want from outside the realm of the familiar, a want you are not yet acquainted with, jolts you slightly out of place.

It’s unpleasant, that’s how you know it started. The sudden craving for transformation may come at a point in your existence when change and your innate desire for it succumbed to blissful stagnation. But why would stagnation be blissful and how would we know it’s truly so, save for our imagination, that creates stories of its own by comparison to what, sometimes, becomes too unpredictable a reality to bear?

So then, wonder flows in, softly nudging you awake at a time of rest. You might then ponder, or even marvel at the potential existence of a more ample space for you to explore, beyond the high walls of contentment, now tall and heavy; beyond the smooth flow of routine, beyond the palpable, the commonplace, the…monotonous?

Cue anxiety- and doubt. The whys the buts the what ifs the maybes and inevitably, the Idontknows. The ambiguity, the insecurity, all steadily pulling you away from the quiet shores of your comfort zone and deeper into the storms of the unknown, so distressing a process that you begin to question if it was worth it altogether.

Then, striking from the outskirts of certainty, the knowledge that something monumental is about to happen meets you in the stomach- a low, forceful pulse deep beneath the skin. It knows what you need to know. Give it time, listen to it. Give it years, if need be.

Change is preceded by a time of self-learning that cannot be driven, it drives; it cannot be forced, it sets the pace, and it cannot be skipped, because it is the very foundation your future will rest on: if you didn’t ask all the questions first, how would you know what answers to seek?

You go through the motions until the sky starts to clear. And it does. The more you go through change, the more you understand that things start falling into place not magically, but as the result of the inner and outer forces you summoned and allowed to play. Every previous thought and action, every doubt and insecurity that felt crippling at the time, is now revealed as a support pillar in your self-renovation. Parts of your path may have been built in the dark, but you will see them.

There’s no fixed recipe for how it should be, and no real need for certainty, either: the journey towards transformation must be flexible, to allow you to adapt to it.

Keep going.