The Small Courage of Arrival
On showing up to your own life, one small threshold at a time
“You are in the midst of an amazing saga of evolution.
You are part of the unfolding, the awakening, the infinite adventure.
Beauty abounds, answering your questions.
Your journey has begun, and you have embarked.”
-Brian McLaren, The Galapagos Islands
I. Flickering Into the Day
This morning I stood in my kitchen longer than the coffee required. The light above me hadn’t committed to the day either. It hovered the way December light does like someone lingering in the doorway unsure whether to stay. Flickering and buzzing, the light and I entered that between-state, that almost-here, almost-ready place. I lingered, not wanting to move on, until the deadlines finally tugged me forward.
It still surprises me how much effort it takes to arrive anywhere, even in your own life. The body shows up first. The mind wanders in later, carrying whatever negotiations it has for the day. The heart usually stumbles in last, bleary-eyed, wearing yesterday’s clothes, with all the mental clarity of a freshman who discovered a box of cannabis gummies five minutes before philosophy class.
II. The Self in Motion
Psychologists say the self isn’t a fixed point but a continual process of becoming, a series of micro-arrivals that rarely sync up. I once read identity described as “perpetual threshold-crossing,” which felt dramatic until I realized how often my inner world feels like a small airport with endless delays. Some mornings it feels as if I am running border control inside my own chest, each part of me waiting in a different line. If I must live with these borders, I hope I can manage them with kindness, even when the parts of me look like strangers.
III. The Small, Quiet Courage of Arrival
Maybe that is why arrival takes courage, not the heroic kind, but the quiet willingness to cross those inner borders labeled Not Yet, Too Much, Come Back Later and step into the moment anyway.
To arrive can feel like leaving something behind, or like something has left you. That can be terrifying and, in many ways, true. Yet to dwell only on that fear is to miss the fact that arrival also opens you to new possibility. You do not end with less. You have not been abandoned.
IV. The Myth of the Final Version
Lately I have been wondering if the real trouble is that we expect wherever we arrive to be final. We treat life like a destination we keep failing to reach, the right job, the right marriage, the right bank account, the right version of ourselves. But life keeps unfolding. One day you are broke. The next day you have enough. The day after that you are wondering if “enough” is enough. Everything keeps shifting, roles, desires, identities, the way your heart handles hope.
Adults are just children who have learned to pretend these transitions are normal. We convince ourselves we can predict them. But we cannot control the future, and like Bruno in Encanto or the witches in Macbeth, our forecasts are always a little off.
So, what if we dropped the constant evaluation?
What if we stopped trying to figure it out?
What if we stopped grading ourselves on stability and trusted that we are always changing, always growing, always arriving?
What if the goal was not to nail down a final self but to make room for the next one to be born? To be born again. To surrender ourselves to that unfolding.
V. A Place for New Beginnings
The Advent story hums under all this, a couple on the road, closed doors, a borrowed room, a birth that came whether anyone was ready or not. What moves me is not the miracle. It is the human ache beneath it, the search for a place where a new beginning can breathe.
Modern migrants know this in their bones. We can learn from them. And in quieter ways, we know this too. We are all wandering toward some kind of safety, a place of rest. We are all hoping to find a space, externally or internally, where the newest and most tender part of us can emerge without getting trampled.
So this morning, watching the light inch across the counter, I felt something loosen. Maybe courage is not a single decisive arrival. Maybe it is the soft, ongoing willingness to keep showing up to our unfinished becoming without demanding that it look stable or impressive, and instead engage in the spiritual tasks of letting yourself be remade.
Maybe that is what Advent is beneath all the pageantry, the daily, sometimes hourly, act of finding room to be born again. Not in a grand spiritual way, but in the small human sense:
a little more honest,
a little more awake,
a little more willing to cross another invisible threshold inside ourselves.
In this way, maybe Advent is less a season and more of a posture, the steady practice of clearing a little space inside ourselves so something new can draw its first breath.