Eunoia (εὔνοια)

A Meditation on Becoming

Live the questions now. — Rainer Maria Rilke

An Unbounded Journey

Life arrives, with or without our consent. We do not choose it. We do not ask for it. Life gives itself to us. With that gift comes an irrevocable burden: a journey each of us must travel—without accurate maps, without rehearsal.

Some walk this path gladly, as if someone pointed out the way. Some move recklessly, gambling with each step. Some trudge forward as though stones fill their pockets. Others drift on autopilot, present in body but absent in every other sense. I have lived as each of them at different times, sometimes within the same season. Still, we all move through the same unavoidable geography: from birth to death, from self to world, from known to unknown.

This journey distinguishes itself not by its terrain, but by the solitude it offers. Each of us walks it anew, and each of us walks alone. We cannot borrow a map. We cannot inherit another’s experience and claim it as our own. No one receives an accurate guide. Everyone acts on instinct, following a fragile attentiveness to what feels barely true.

Life refuses neat divisions. It does not separate growth from loss, light from shadow. Death—and the grief that follows it, vast and obscene as an open wound—does not oppose life. It binds itself to life so tightly that nothing can pull it free. To live means to grieve. To become means to lose. Life does not collapse under this weight; it stands because of it.

The Glasses We Wear

We often look outward for heroes and teachers, lifting our eyes toward figures we imagine possess what we lack. Rarely do we consider that we may already embody the role we seek. The completeness we chase may not wait somewhere beyond us; it may lie within us, constrained by inherited beliefs, swallowed attitudes, and a self-doubt so familiar that we no longer feel its pressure.

Our beliefs act like a pair of sunglasses. We put them on without ceremony. At first, we notice the change: light dims, colors shift, edges soften. Moments later, the sensation fades. We stop noticing the lenses and begin to accept what we see as the world itself.

A pause in restlessness can open space for recognition. We notice the glasses—our beliefs, patterns, inherited narratives—and we summon the courage to remove them. This undoing unsettles us. It exposes us. We stand in unfamiliar light without protection, uncertain of what will appear once the familiar tint disappears.

This work of seeing clearly does not ask us to add anything to ourselves. It demands subtraction. It calls for careful removal. We free ourselves from the beliefs we carry about who we are, from the insistence that we must repair ourselves, from the narratives that dictate what wholeness should resemble.

Only then can we recognize who we are beneath the scaffolding of expectation.

The Incompleteness That Teaches

Each of us remains unfinished. We live as works in progress. This condition does not signal failure; it defines life.

Perhaps we should revise every judgment we make—every assessment we direct toward ourselves or others—by adding a single word: yet.

That person has not learned compassion—yet. She has not developed courage—yet. He has not discovered his purpose—yet. That small addition opens a door. It reframes incompleteness as movement rather than lack, as a moment within ongoing becoming.

If life unfolds as a process—and it does—then all judgments remain provisional. Nothing stays fixed.

Inner change leaves no visible marks. No bruise explains the ache. No wound offers proof. So we borrow the language of falling and fracture to describe what resists naming. To change at all, we must accept the risk of falling without rehearsing the outcome. We must risk damage. We must trust that healing sometimes arrives not by restoring who we were, but by reshaping us into someone we never anticipated.

Pain shadows every risk we take. Some ruptures refuse to mend. Some breaks reshape our inner architecture forever. Still, when we allow.