There’s a labyrinth not too far from my home that my family enjoys visiting every once in a while. Several months ago, I watched my daughter as she sped along the winding trail while sharing cheerfully that she knew exactly where she was going and that I just needed to follow. As we wound our way back and forth, I started to think about the similarities between a labyrinth path and life’s journey. I admired my daughter’s confidence and I longed for a similar assurance in the circuitous journeys of life. I wish I could say I traverse life’s experiences with such confidence, but in reality I often find myself confounded by unexpected turns and surprised by the seemingly unending cycle of constant learning and relearning. The further I meandered along the labyrinth trail that afternoon, the more uniquely apropos the parallels with life’s journey seemed. Although, rather than feeling comfort in the similarities, I instead became overwhelmed by the circuitous nature and convinced that I needed to somehow find a way to accumulate grace in order to draw from a reserve anytime I needed to more calmly and confidently navigate life’s more difficult turns.

Over the past few months, I have been on a winding journey of grief, navigating a constant ebb and flow of sorrow to hope, calm to agitation, fear to peace. Whenever the cycle appears to be near an end, I discover it actually starts over in an unpredictable yet hauntingly familiar fashion. I often find myself asking, Where’s the next step I thought I had reached at this point? How can it seem I’m three steps and a turn behind where I was the previous week? I find myself wishing grief, and maybe life in general, were linear so that when I reach a new step all the previous emotions or insight would be completely processed, done, over, but the knowledge and awareness incorporated seamlessly into my journey. Instead, I find myself wandering the circuitous labyrinth, the complexity of competing emotions seemingly always accompanying me and the journey not so much moving forward as winding back and forth.

In large part because of what I’ve learned during my current grief journey, I have discovered a need to rely on grace in order to better navigate the journey. To that end, I have done my best to protect time to allow and incorporate grace into my daily life. The other night, as I sat in the quiet living room and soaked in a chance to breathe and just be, for a brief moment I felt an almost palpable sense of grace surround me. This moment of peace pushed against the battle of grief and the internal pressure to know how or if everything would work out. As the moment came to an end, I imagined bottling up all the grace I had just experienced in order to pour out during an inevitable difficult moment in the future. Then I stopped myself, realizing that despite my wishful thinking, that isn’t really how life’s journey works. That moment of peace, calm, and rejuvenation was for that moment. Similar to breathing, I can’t store up breaths for some future moment when I might need oxygen. Breath has to be a continuous part of life. I can’t soak up and save moments of grace to utilize in a future moment of crisis. Aspects of meditation and intentional calm need to be a continuous part of life. With this new awareness in mind, I realized I needed to stop approaching my quiet time with the mindset that I just need to be more efficient at storing up and then tapping into peace when needed later; instead, I need to be more willing to pause throughout my daily journey and simply accept grace. This mindset shift reminded me of a quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “It is the nature of grace always to fill spaces that have been empty.”

As I continue through life’s labyrinth, where emotions and understanding return again and again, where stress and grief and assurance stretch between a pendulum of peaceful hope and emotional chaos, I have begun to search for the grace that is caught in brief moments of quiet breath. Maybe sometimes grace is like frost on a winter morning, showing up fresh every day. Maybe sometimes grace is breathtaking, like a sunrise or sunset. Maybe sometimes grace is obvious and ordinary but often taken for granted, like breath. Maybe, if given a chance, grace fills the empty spaces. Maybe grace accompanies me as breath throughout life’s labyrinth journey. And maybe that is enough.

Wendi is co-author of The Unexpected Ever Afters blog and enjoys sipping extra hot coffee, sharing a love of reading with her kids, and exploring bike trails.

photo credit: personal photos