Last night I watched a video about what to remember when life gets difficult. And there was one idea in it that touched me much more deeply than I expected.

The person in the video said that when we are in the middle of a storm, we tend to identify with our problems. We become overwhelmed by them, and eventually the darkness is all we can see. But the darkness isn’t everything. We are the ones walking through it.

I don’t know exactly what happened when I heard that. As I’ve written in my last few posts, this is a particularly difficult period of my life, and lately there have been moments when what is happening has felt so big that it has occupied almost all the space in my head. But something about that idea stayed with me.

It was almost as if the video had planted a tiny seed in my mind.

I went to sleep, and apparently somewhere underneath all the noise, my brain kept working on it. Because this morning I woke up feeling different.

Nothing had magically changed overnight. The things that are difficult are still difficult. The problems are still there. But I was different inside them.

And suddenly I wanted to move.

I pulled everything out of my wardrobe and completely reorganised it. I decluttered clothes and things I no longer wanted. I changed parts of the house around. I cleaned. I filled a bag with things to give to charity and took it out. I started making space around me, almost without thinking about why I was doing it.

And only afterwards did I realise how strange that was.

Because maybe, while I was physically moving things around me, something had started moving inside me too.

I don’t want to turn this into one of those stories where one inspirational video changes your life overnight. It didn’t. I’m still going through the same difficult period I was going through yesterday. But perhaps that is exactly the point.

Yesterday, the darkness felt like a place.

This morning, it felt like something I was moving through.

And there is an enormous difference between the two.

The darkness is not where I live. It is somewhere I am walking through.

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Inspired by “3 Things You MUST Remember During DIFFICULT Times” of My Personal Calma