When Milestones Become Millstones...

As I sit in both contemplation and celebration of a wedding anniversary, I find myself drawn to other marked occasions that live nearby in the calendar and in memory—some still carrying joy, others edged with sadness or quiet regret.

I think of the circumstances that surround these events, the layers of perceived responsibility and obligation that can arrive with them. The same date can be met with joy-filled anticipation or with a deep-seated dread. What makes us encounter these times so differently?

I am a pragmatic Pollyanna, oriented by realism. That orientation seems to set a different course from the one many people take after significant endings. I keep returning to the choice of direction: whether to put energy into what can begin next, or to invite bitterness to settle in and define the story. Understanding and forgiveness can lay a path forward; the alternative is to keep stepping backward into shadows that no longer need to be lived in.

Divine timing has a way of presenting stepping stones exactly when the current is strongest.

For me one of those stones arrived as a magazine article in a brand-new publication for women. It laid out, with unusual clarity, the choice of where to place one’s energy after a relationship breakdown: forward into what might still be possible, or backward into the story of what had been lost. Years later another stone appeared in the work of Louise Hay—the simple, radical understanding that we are all doing the best we can at any given moment, given where we are and what we know. That understanding became a further layer of forgiveness: toward others, and toward the earlier versions of ourselves.

These moments did not erase the marked dates or the feelings that can still rise around them. They simply offered a different way to meet them. The anniversary, the ending, the obligatory gathering—none of them lost their place in the calendar. What changed was the invitation to decide, again and again, whether the date would remain a marker or be allowed to harden into something heavier.

How one relates to life’s opportunities or roadblocks is shaped in part by environment, by experience, by the point of view one has inherited or absorbed. Yet more than any of these, it is shaped by choice.

Give in.

Give up.

Stand tall.

Walk forward.

The marked dates will keep arriving—anniversaries, endings, traditional gatherings, sudden beginnings. Some will still carry joy, others a residue of sadness or regret. The difference lies less in the date itself than in the stance we bring to it. Bitterness can be invited to settle and become identity; obligation can be performed until it hardens into facade. Or the same moment can be met with the clear-eyed decision to place energy where it can still create, to offer understanding where blame once lived, and to keep walking.

The milestone does not have to become a millstone.

That remains a choice we get to make, again and again.

~ in quiet inclination ML