What do you do when you don’t know what comes next? When you can’t see the way ahead?

When you are between where you are now and where you want to be?

David Bayles wrote in Art & Fear that “Fear comes in when vision outruns execution.”  When you can’t see the way clearly. Fear that you won’t get to where you want to be. Fear that you don’t know how. Fear that you aren’t enough, that you don’t have what it takes.

When you have a great dream, a deep desire, a wish that resonates across your spirit – when you know how you want your life or art to be, but you are completely blind as to how to get from here to there – what do you do?

You trust. You breathe. You remember that you are exactly where you are meant to be.

You open up to being vulnerable, to accepting that you are in a place right now where you can’t see.

I call it being blind. And I learned early on that blindness is a part of the natural rhythms of life. When you can’t see ahead, you have to trust. You have to surrender to not knowing.

That’s not easy to do, but it’s necessary. We think that we must be in control, that action is always the answer, that it’s wrong to “not know.”

It’s not wrong. It’s necessary.

Because to get to where you want to be, you have to trust that the path does lie ahead of you; you have to put one foot in front of the other and keep walking. Sometimes, you have to stop and rest.

And sometimes (maybe often actually) the Universe needs you to wait patiently, unseeing, while it arranges the circumstances and timing that will take you forward.

Patience and faith. Faith that you are okay when you are blind. That vision will return. That you will see the path clearly again.

You will know what comes next.