She had been firmly skeptical at twenty-five. Rational, evidence-based, a little smug about it. She would have dismissed the practice she now does every morning as pseudoscience for people who couldn’t handle reality.
She can’t fully explain what changed. Some years, some losses, some things that happened that reason handled only partially.
She doesn’t talk about it to most people who knew her at twenty-five. She is aware of the irony. She has mostly made peace with it.
The thing about certainty at twenty-five is that you haven’t experienced enough yet to know what you’ll need. The explanatory frameworks that feel complete before life has fully tested them often need supplementing later. Not replacing. Supplementing. What arrives to fill the gaps is not always something the younger version would have approved of.
People change what they believe. That’s not failure. That’s time.
I’ve found myself drawn to things I would have dismissed earlier. Not always spiritual things. But things I had decided weren’t for me before I knew what I was actually going to need.
She does the practice every morning. It works for her. She can’t fully defend it. She has stopped needing to.
What would the twenty-five-year-old version of her think about who she’s become?
The most honest version of a spiritual life is rarely the one you planned for yourself at the beginning. It gets shaped by what happens. By what cracks the framework and what fills the cracks afterward.
She found something she would have laughed at. She kept doing it anyway. She is less certain about many things than she was at twenty-five. She is more sure of this one thing than of almost anything else.
Some things worth sitting with:
- Has your relationship with faith or meaning changed significantly from what you expected at a younger age?
- Is there something you now find useful or true that you would have dismissed before?
- What’s the relationship between certainty and experience?
There’s a related thread worth following: He Wanted God to Be Real. He Just Couldn’t Make Himself Believe..
Inspired by a real story shared anonymously online.