A reflection on friendship, grief, resilience, and learning to trust change during life transitions
God gave you brains, now don’t go and drown in your own thinkings.
God gave you hands so you could pick up your broken pieces.
God gave you feet so you can find your own way home.
Let’s run away, just know your troubles tend to follow.
Pack your bags, just know that everything here’s borrowed.
The pathmaker is a trickster, so make your own damn road.
The Great Unknown, Cloud Cult
Yesterday I had lunch with a friend.
Returning to our Friend Train conversation of a few weeks ago, this friend sat next to me in the Close Connections section when we worked in the same place for 12 years and had a deep friendship that transcended work.
We changed jobs, life happened, we both dedicated ourselves to chasing kids, and busy careers consumed our time, attention, and energy. He gradually shifted to the Continued Connections section of my train.
We’re similar, he and I, about what matters most and different enough about what doesn’t to keep it interesting. We’ve shared some great times and a life-changing tragedy. It’s a friendship that never shifted to Closed Connection, despite the time lapses between conversations and connection.
About a year ago we started meeting for lunch once a month.
The last few months our schedules didn’t overlap so it had been a while. We had about 45 minutes, start to finish, because we had to get back to work.
Yet if you were to look at a transcript of our conversation, the shorthand, depth, and ground we covered would reflect a connection that had endured despite time and distance.
I drove home with a smile on my face and had a flashback to a moment I had after we had been working together for about a year.
I was 35 years old at the time and he a few years older. We worked with a wonderful group of people and there were about 6 of us who were within six years of each other. I thought that we could work together for another three decades or so until we started retiring. At the time that felt very appealing and comfortable.
Today? We are all still working and only one of us still works at that job.
Life had other plans.
We had to find faith in the Great Unknown as our career and life paths forked in other directions.
As I drove home from lunch, I found myself thinking about a piece I wrote in October 2022.
Read on, fellow travelers.
Fire In My Dance Shoes
In 2021, my children and I attended a virtual author event that our local bookstore was hosting.
The author (Lauren Tarshis) is a favorite of my family’s. She writes a children’s series about child narrators who survive natural disasters, wars, and other tragedies. Each I Survived story balances history teaching with resilience promotion in a story-based way that appeals to children and their adult caregivers alike.
She was promoting her book about the 1900 Galveston Hurricane, and an audience member asked her what music she had listened to as she wrote the story. The author shared that she had listened to an album recommended to her by a friend. It was Cloud Cult’s The Seeker.
Within a month, The Seeker became my most frequently listened to album. (2026 update: I still love it and turn to it often.)
The lyrics anchor me when I feel adrift, reminding me to embrace life’s uncertainty and trust that I will get through whatever obstacle lies before me.
One of my favorite songs is entitled To the Great Unknown. The song reminds me that life is comprised of challenging moments and my job is to keep moving without allowing my self-talk to impede my progress and keep me stuck in a place of uncertainty.
I don’t enjoy uncertainty very much. Most of us don’t. It threatens our internal safety zones and makes us feel vulnerable.
The uncertainty itself isn’t the problem. It’s what we do with it.
Do we exhale a deep sigh and move forward? Do we choose another path, one that feels more predictable and comfortable? Do we fuel it with worries and worst-case predictions that keep our feet stuck in place?
The same pot of hot water can dissolve salt, hard boil an egg, or brew tea leaves.
It isn’t the water. It’s what we do with the water.
It’s how we use it and how we allow ourselves to be changed by it. Later it becomes about how the hot water changed us and how we hold the memories of the experience.
Like uncertainty, hot water is scary for most of us. It carries a threat of danger and potential pain. Who wants that?
When we remind ourselves that we know how to safely handle hot water (and uncertainty), we are less likely to fear being burned. We are more likely to become resilient narrators who survived the tragedies and traumas life threw at us. We become the heroes of our own I Survived novels.
But life gets uncomfortable first.
Back to Us, Fellow Travelers
A few hours after that lunch with my friend, I met a group of former colleagues to celebrate two wonderful people who are leaving their jobs at the end of this academic year.
One knows where life is taking her next, the other is not yet sure.
The one who knows where life is taking her is having the same experience I had when I left the job where the lunch friend and I had worked together. It’s a complicated mix of happiness, nerves, and excitement with threads of grief and loss running through the plaid. The plaid holds many positive memories, some sad and frustrating ones, and a lot of personal growth that feels good to consider. Though mine is a bit more faded than hers, I still remember how it felt on my shoulders and can see the life lessons woven through it.
The colleague who isn’t sure yet?
His plaid is darker, woven with hurt and the colors of grief, loss, and uncertainty. It’s too early for the contrasting colors of excitement, happiness, and pride in what he accomplished. The personal growth is in-process and so is the healing.
I know that plaid too from an undesirable job ending and it wasn’t easy to wear it and bear the emotional weight while trying to move forward. Years later, I can see the personal growth woven through the plaid and the contrasting colors. But they took time to appear.
What Can We Hold as Certain During Life Transitions?
Life is going to change as what we want from it shifts.
Our connections change too.
Some will deepen.
Some will fade.
Some will be released with a gentle kiss and others with anger or grief.
Some that faded will be rekindled and transformed into something beautifully different.
We rarely get to choose the timing of those transitions.
We do, however, get to choose how we travel through them.
How do we move forward when our paths—friendship, career, adjustment to whatever life threw at us—aren’t yet clear and we are wearing a heavy plaid made from dark colors like grief, anger, and betrayal?
We make space for how heavy the plaid feels on our shoulders as we carry our emotional burdens.
We hold our pain and challenges with self-compassion as we put one foot in front of the other and trust that, one day, the plaid will be woven with contrasting colors that lighten our load. The life lessons and personal growth will not always feel as raw as they do while we are living them.
Then we find an inspiring song that reminds us that we have a 100% success rate of getting through difficult times and that we can hold onto faith when our shoulders and backs are weary from our heavy plaid.
And play it on repeat.
May you find grace when overtaken by the tempest.
May you find humor in the cynic and the pessimist.
May you find faith in the Great Unknown.
Lay it all down… in a calm, safe space.
And if the dream doesn’t come… just wait. Just wait.
The Great Unknown, Cloud Cult
Ubuntu, fellow travelers.
Jennifer
For my friends who inspired this reflection, with gratitude, love and hope.
Related Reflections
Why Friendships Change Over Time
How to Know When It’s Time For a Change
How to Find Courage When Your Life Falls Apart
Rest. Reflect. Reimagine.
A Self-Reflection Exercise for Navigating Life Transitions with Self-Compassion, Curiosity, and Grace
Rest.
Pause for a moment.
Take a slow breath in.
And a slow breath out.
Allow yourself to consider life transitions you are experiencing, have recently experienced, or may be considering.
No hurry.
No judgment.
Begin by simply holding the life transitions.
Reflect.
Consider the plaid you are wearing right now as you think about your life transitions.
Does the plaid feel dark, light, or a mix of darkness and light?
What colors are most visible?
Are they the colors of grief?
Loss?
Uncertainty?
Hope?
Excitement?
Relief?
What life transitions are you navigating?
What part of those life transitions feel heaviest today?
Are there any part(s) of the life transitions that feel light?
Reimagine.
What lessons might eventually be woven into this plaid, even if you cannot see them yet?
How might those lessons change the way the plaid looks?
What would it look like to trust that the contrasting colors will come in their own time?
When you’re ready, take another slow breath.
Then put one foot in front of the other and continue your journey into the Great Unknown.
Remember, fellow travelers, weaving a plaid from life transitions is often a lifelong journey as new experiences entwine with the wisdom gained from the paths you have already traveled.
With gratitude to Lauren Tarshis for her wonderful I Survived series, especially I Survived the Galveston Hurricane, 1900, and to Cloud Cult for creating music that inspires me to keep my feet moving and pointed toward my dreams.
© 2026 Jennifer Ayres, PhD | Still River Counseling, PLLC
Written with care for fellow travelers navigating life’s changing currents.
🌐 StillRiverCounseling.com | 📍 Austin, TX
