Ceremony by Brianna Wiest

I found Ceremony by Brianna Wiest in a quaint little shop on Martha’s Vineyard when I was on the East Coast. I recently rediscovered it on my bookshelf and started flipping to a new page each morning.

As we move into autumn, a season of change and transition, this morning’s message felt especially timely. I thought I’d share it with you.

pg 83-85:

"I hope that you find the courage to gently start over. Sometimes, starting over is an abrupt ending. It is rising one morning and by the time the sun is setting you clearly see that you must leave. You must change where you are and who you are and what you do, because your existing life has so little of your soul within it, it's leaving you as a shell of the person you might be.

Then there's the kind of starting over where we begin to understand that all the successes we might crave in love, and in work, and in ourselves - are really just a matter of constantly trying new things until we get it right. Because for every one thing that works, there will be a thousand that don't.

You just don't hear people tell stories about those things.

This is the kind of starting over that leaves you scrapping the manuscript three times, restarting the business, renovating, then tweaking, then coming up with a more aligned and supportive vision, and then reinventing, and then implementing, and then seeing what sticks. This is the kind of starting over that's all about adaptation. You know that you have a good thing, or a passion, or a truth, and all you're really trying to find is the right way to make it real within the world. Because no path is a straight line, and if we want to stay on it, we have to bend, lest we break.

Then there's the kind of starting over that's the most important of all.

And that's the kind you do each day.

That's the kind where the changes are so subtle, you might not even notice them at all. But these are the shifts that actually change your life. This is the way you slowly learn over time how to style that natural wave in your hair you always hated and have now decided it's time to learn to love.

This is the way that you slowly learn to savor each sip of your morning coffee and to sit in silence and be grateful that life has given you another day to live it.

This is the way that you begin to speak and respond to the people you love as the person you hope to be. One big motion does not make for a breakthrough; it is a tipping point, and a tipping point is a collection of small changes.

If you are NOT willing to start over in the smallest moments of your life, and in the gentlest and most unassuming of ways - When your flight lands in the new city, your habits will come with you. Every new blueprint you draw will have within it the SAME old design. Every road will lead to the SAME destination because you have not really changed the way you travel, and to where.

Your story is not over. You are not the sum of the people you used to be, you are not the sum of the way other people see you, and you are not the sum of what you think you are capable of right now. I hope that you learn you do not need to wait for a huge wave of motivation, you do not need to wait until you are absolutely ready or confident or sure.

Find the simplest change you can, and then make it.

Wake up tomorrow, and do it again."