A friend was going through a tough time at work. I told her something that I think I needed hear.

“Whatever happens, you come through this. A job won’t last forever, no matter how this shakes out. But you will be there when it’s over.”

I could feel it humming in her, the potential. That little choice was in there somewhere. Maybe we all have it: the power to decide what shape we come out on the other side of hard things. Maybe it’s the only decision we ever have to make.

I’m the only part of the equation I control, and even then, “control” is a concept. So I point my feet and square my shoulders. I fill my lungs with more air than the fear wants to let in.

“There’s a woman who strides forth,” a poet friend once observed of me. He swept his arm out as he said it, as if toward the path appearing before us.

We stride forth. May it be so.

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