Retreat Life & Reflection
It arrived on a Friday.
I had waited weeks for it. I had donated the old one, sat with the empty room, and written about the courage it takes to make space for something new.
And then it came through the door and I looked at it under my living room lights and said out loud, to no one in particular, “Oh hell. I messed up.”
The color looked completely different than it did in the showroom. What read as a warm greige under those lights looked flat and grey in mine. The ottoman I ordered didn’t work with the space at all. And I stood there in my own living room, feeling like a woman who fancies herself an interior designer and clearly is not.
I couldn’t send it back because it was too inconvenient, and the wait would have been too long. So I did the only thing I knew to do.
I spiraled.
Two hours on my laptop looking at pillows. Scrolling, comparing, second-guessing every option, trying to find something that would rescue me from my own mistake. Two full hours. It never once occurred to me to go back and look at the pillows I had already ordered weeks ago, the ones already on their way.
Finally, exhausted from the search, I went back and looked at them.
Oh.
The navy in the pillows works well with grey. And they also pull the color from the new rug, making the whole space feel warmer. Maybe this could still work. I hadn’t bought them with this problem in mind. I bought them before I even knew there was anything to fix.
I sat back and thought, maybe I stumbled into a good choice without knowing it.
Or maybe it was all divinely aligned from the beginning.
I’ve been sitting with that second thought.
Because this is my pattern. It shows up in my living room and it shows up in my leadership. Something arrives that doesn’t look the way I pictured it. I panic. I scramble. I spend two hours, metaphorically speaking, scrolling for a solution when the answer is already on its way, already chosen, already aligned.
Sometimes you don’t know you made the right choice until everything else arrives. And the waiting requires a kind of patience that doesn’t come naturally to me. I have to talk myself into it every single time.
The conversation in my head goes something like this. So what do we know? What don’t we know? What can we do in the meantime? What’s the worst that could happen? What’s the best? Is this an insurmountable problem? No. Will there be a path forward? Yes. Can you wait for the path to be made clear? Yes. Then calm down and trust the process.
And then I remind myself that no matter what, the universe always provides an answer. We will either roll forward or pivot. And there is absolutely no sense in panicking before the answer comes.
The pillows haven’t arrived yet. But I’ve been here before, in the middle of a mess I made, certain I had ruined everything, only to find out later that the pieces were always going to come together.
I’m choosing to trust that this time is no different.
What’s the thing in your life right now that looks wrong under your current lighting, but might just need the right pieces to come together?
