Usually, if I have to decide between two paths in my life, I try to pick the path that scares me more. If one option seems ‘logical’ and ‘makes perfect sense’ and the other gives me a fluttery feeling in my stomach and thoughts of ‘I’m not good enough for this’ or ‘this will never work’, I will, as often as I’m able to, pick the second option. I could give you a few great-sounding reasons for this behavior; I could tell you that I value courage, that I desire being fully alive instead of being fully secure, I could tell you that I like to face my limitations. And yet, it’s also true that I’m terrified of being stuck. It feels a lot like death to me.

Mystics from every era and faith can tell you that life will eventually defeat you in some way. Usually more than once. It will hand you the thing that feels a lot like death. Sometimes through the loss of people you love, an illness or a break-up. Sometimes, if you’re really unlucky, through everything at once. My defeat this year arrived in the form of being stuck. I had always prided myself on being decisive and here I was, not being able to decide a thing. In early 2025, finished a novel I’d worked on for a decade. After the initial elation, I noticed how much I had expected something to happen after my effort: to me, to the book, to my life. But very little happened, despite my dedicated daily efforts. Instead, I found myself in such dense fog (the fog is a metaphor, mostly) that the entire question of ‘choice’ became a bit of a joke. Choose what? Choose where? I felt burnt out and confused, frustrated and slow. I took a lot of walks, filled various notebooks with scribbles and let my hair grow out.

I’ve heard people say this sort of directionless fog is quite normal in midlife. I’m turning 39 in two weeks; I guess I’m right on time. In moments when I felt particularly lost, I imagined the ghost of of Swiss psychotherapist Carl Gustav Jung (who had much to say about the two halves of life) in the room with me as I told him about my troubles. He always smiled. I guess he’s been there.

If I had to locate myself on a map right now, I probably couldn’t do it; there’s still some fog hanging about. But I’m slowly beginning to see that the purpose of all these months of disorientation was not just to mess with my inner compass. The purpose was to re-orient my inner compass. To equip me with a sense of knowing that will carry me past forty. Into all the years I may yet be alive.

I have this hunch that this new kind of knowing will feel a lot less certain, a lot less righteous, and a lot more like music. Like a strange bird passing overhead, or a slight tremor in the earth after a distant train goes by. A lot more mysterious. Perhaps this is also what Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe talks about in this passage: “The impatient idealist says: 'Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.' But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace.”

At her pace. To believe that we are the ones setting the pace, that our will can define the shape of things to come, is hubris, Achebe warns us. I think in the first half of our lives we need a dose of this kind of hubris. We get to be impatient idealists. I would certainly count myself as one. That is, until I encountered a situation where my will, along with all my plans for action, was no longer useful. I was asked to move at a different pace. I’d like to think it’s the pace of the earth itself.

I’m writing about this today because there’s a Full Moon in Capricorn. The sign of the sea goat is, unlike any other, concerned with evolving concrete forms. Capricorn understands and values deep time and, quietly and ambitiously, works to change societal structures. In its most positive expression, it can be a very patient idealist.

So, maybe you want to reflect on the structures and forms you’ve evolved in your own life, the times where you held steady and didn’t give up. And maybe you also want to reflect on how, at times, life has evolved you; how events or people have changed you deeply, in ways you would not have chosen but are grateful for now.

In short, today is a moment to be grateful for the pace of the earth, the slow forming of mountains. The way they are so indifferent to us but hold us, nonetheless.