One Small Step at a Time

 One Small Step at a Time

There's a myth we tell ourselves about change: that it should look dramatic. 

A leap. 

    A breakthrough. 

        A before-and-after with nothing in between.

But most real change ... the kind that lasts ... doesn't happen that way at all. It happens in steps so small you almost miss them while you're taking them.

The Body Already Knows This

Ask anyone who's trained for endurance sport, and they'll tell you the same thing: the athletes who blow up are the ones who go out too fast. The ones who finish, the ones who actually get to cross the line, they are the ones who found a pace they could sustain long before they needed to.

It's a strange thing to learn in your body before you learn it anywhere else: that slow and steady isn't a consolation prize. It's the actual strategy. The fast start feels better for about a mile. The sustainable pace is the one that gets you home.

Grief works this way. Healing works this way. Growth works this way. We want the mile-one feeling ... the burst, the certainty, the sense that we're really doing something now. But the nervous system, the heart, the spirit, well... they don't do bursts well. They do rhythm. They do return. They do one foot, then the other, for longer than feels reasonable, until one day you look up and you're somewhere new.

Why We Resist Slow

Slow doesn't look like much from the outside. There's no dramatic photo, no clean narrative arc, no moment you can point to and say that's when it changed. And in a culture that rewards visible transformation, that can feel like failure … like you're not really moving if no one can see it.

But consistency is quiet by design. The step you take today doesn't have to prove anything. It just has to happen, and then happen again tomorrow. That's the whole secret, and it's also the whole difficulty, because consistency asks for patience with a process that refuses to perform for you. (oof…shoot)

What Small Steps Protect

There's something else slow, steady movement gives you that speed never can: the ability to notice. When you move at a pace your whole self can keep up with, you stay in contact with what's actually happening, in your body, in your grief, in your relationships. You catch the signal before it becomes a crisis. You adjust before you're forced to.

Moving fast often means moving past; past your own limits, past the quiet ache that was trying to tell you something, past the people and practices that could have supported you if you'd had time to notice them. Moving slowly is how you stay in relationship with your own life while you're living it.

A Practice, Not a Performance

If you're in a season that calls for change, whether it is grief, transition, healing, or growth of any kind … you do not need a bigger step. You need a repeatable one. Something small enough to do on your worst day, meaningful enough to matter on your best.

Ask yourself: what is the smallest true step I can take today? Not the most impressive one. The truest one. Then take it. Tomorrow, take it again.

This is not a lesser way to change. It is, in fact, the only way that ever really holds.

One small step at a time. That's not a compromise, that is the path.

Being Present in the Life We Are Living

 

I've spent a lot of words, in this space, talking about grief. About how it moves through us, what it asks of us, how it deepens us if we let it. I've said before that grief is unexpressed joy -  that the ache we feel in loss is proportional to the love we were lucky enough to have. That insight has held up under everything I've thrown at it.

But lately I've been sitting with the other side of that equation. If grief is what joy looks like when it has nowhere left to go, then presence is what joy looks like when it's still here. Still available. Still asking to be felt, right now, before it becomes something we only access in retrospect.

This is harder than it sounds. I am, by training and temperament, someone who lives ahead of the moment - planning the next pastoral visit, the next coaching call, the next season. And I am, by circumstance, someone whose household is mid-threshold: a daughter about to leave for a life of her own, a body asking for different care than it used to need, a business taking shape one contract at a time. There is a pull, in seasons like this, to keep one foot already in the next chapter. To love the present loosely, as a kind of insurance against how much it will hurt to lose it.

But that's a trade I don't want to make. Because the things I'd be protecting myself from feeling now are exactly the things I'll grieve later - and grief, when it finally arrives, doesn't give back what presence withheld. It only confirms what was always true: this mattered. This was good. I was here for it, or I wasn't.

So I've been practicing something simple and not at all easy: staying in the room I'm actually in. Tasting the meal instead of planning the next one. Hearing my daughter's voice instead of already missing it. Letting a Tuesday be a whole Tuesday, not just scaffolding for some better day ahead.

This isn't about gratitude journals or forcing gladness. It's closer to what I do in Healing Touch work - a kind of attentiveness that doesn't try to fix or hurry the moment, just meets it. Hands resting on what's true right now. Most of what we call "being present" is really just refusing to abandon the now in favor of the next.

If grief is the receipt joy leaves behind, presence is the chance to actually spend what we have before it's gone. I don't think we get to skip grief by being present - loss still comes for everyone. But I do think we get to choose whether we lived fully in the meantime, or just managed to survive it while waiting for something else.

I'm trying, this season, to choose the first one. One ordinary, unrepeatable day at a time.

A Small Practice

If you want to try this with me, here's a simple way in - no journal required, no major life overhaul, just a few moments of attention reclaimed from the future.

Name one ordinary thing, out loud or in your mind, before it ends. Not the milestones - those announce themselves. The unremarkable ones: the specific way the light comes through the kitchen window at 7am, the sound of someone you love moving around in another room, the particular weight of a Tuesday with nothing dramatic in it. Say to yourself, this is happening now, and I am here for it.

Notice when you've already left. Several times a day, check in: am I actually in this conversation, this meal, this drive - or am I three steps ahead, already managing what comes next? This isn't a judgment, just information. Awareness alone starts to loosen the grip.

Let your hands tell the truth your mind keeps skipping past. This is something I rely on in Healing Touch work, but it translates anywhere: place a hand on your own chest, or on the surface of whatever you're doing - the steering wheel, the kitchen counter, someone's shoulder - and let that contact be the anchor. The body doesn't live in next week. It only knows now.

At the end of the day, ask one question instead of making a list. Not "what did I accomplish," but "what did I actually notice today?" If the answer is thin, that's not a failure - it's just a nudge to look a little closer tomorrow.

None of this prevents grief from eventually arriving. It isn't meant to. It's meant to make sure that when grief does come, it's grieving something we were truly present for - not something we were too busy outrunning to actually live.

The World Will Hold Her Too: On letting go, trusting people, and the grief we forget to name

She borrowed the car last week and I watched the tail-lights disappear around the corner and stood in the driveway longer than I needed to.

She's seventeen and a half. She's been driving for over a year. She is, by every reasonable measure, fine.

And still. I stood there.

There is a particular kind of grief that doesn't have a clean name. It's not loss exactly, she hasn't gone anywhere yet. It's not fear exactly, I'm not convinced something bad is about to happen. It's something more like practicing. Like my body rehearsing, over and over, the reality that she is becoming someone who will move through the world without me as her first point of contact.

That's a kind of grief. Even when nobody has died. Even when everything is okay. Even when you'd be embarrassed to bring it up in a room full of people with real losses.

I know something about grief. I sit with people in it for a living, through diagnosis and dying, through the end of marriages and the end of dreams and the end of
lives that mattered deeply. I help people cross thresholds they cannot cross alone.

And here I am. Standing in my own driveway. Discovering I am not immune to the very thing I've spent decades accompanying in others.

Growth is not graceful

We talk about growth like it's an upward arc. A clean line moving in one direction. But that's not what it looks or feels like, not for the person growing, and not for the people who love them.

Growth is rupture. It's a seed splitting open underground, in the dark, where no one can see it and nothing looks like progress. It's a teenager who is simultaneously the child you held and the stranger you're just beginning to know. It's a parent who thought they were done with certain kinds of heartache discovering new rooms in the house of it.

One of the things I have learned, from the people I've walked with, and from my own body carrying things I couldn't yet name, is that growth almost always feels like loss before it feels like anything else.

You lose the version of things that was familiar. You lose the role you knew how to play. You lose the illusion that love means protection.

These are real losses. They deserve to be grieved, not hurried through.

Thresholds don't only run in one direction

This part I really did not expect. (Or rather I chose to ignore that it could happen)

At the same time I am watching my daughter move toward a bigger life, I am watching our parents move toward a smaller one. Choosing smaller homes and communities with more support around them, proximity to help over the familiar rooms they built their lives inside.

What strikes me…what has quietly undone me, more than once…is that they are doing this willingly.

They have watched what happens when people don't have the choice. When the body or the mind makes the decision before the person is ready, and the weight of managing that fall lands on their children without warning, without preparation, without the grace of having been asked. They have seen it in friends, in siblings, in the people ahead of them on the path. And they are choosing differently - choosing early enough that the choice is still theirs to make.

That is an act of love. Arguably one of the most generous ones I've witnessed.

They are letting go of the lives they built - the square footage, the gardens, the address that meant something - because they love their people enough to spare them the weight of an unplanned landing.

And in doing so, they are also trusting. Trusting that the smaller life will still hold meaning. Trusting that the people around them will show up. Trusting that letting go of what they carried doesn't mean losing who they are.

My daughter is practicing leaving. My parents are practicing release. And I am standing in the middle, watching both, being asked - from both directions simultaneously - to trust that love is not the same as holding on.

But I also believe that people are GOOD

I believe people are good.

Not naive-good. Not pretend-the-world-is-safe good. I've sat at enough bedsides and held hands in too much darkness to be naïve about what human beings are capable of.

But I've also watched something else, over and over: people show up for each other.

The neighbor who appears with food before you thought to ask. The stranger on the trail who pauses when you look like you're struggling. The friend of a friend who turns out to have been through exactly this and calls, unprompted, because someone thought you might need to talk.

People are woven for one another. Not perfectly. Not always. But more than the fear tells us.

I think about the adults who held me when I was seventeen and a half and moving through the world without the traction I thought I had. Teachers. Mentors. Strangers who were kind at the right moment for reasons I'll never fully understand. People who weren't mine and didn't owe me anything and showed up anyway.

My daughter will meet those people. She already has.

And our parents - who spent decades being the ones who showed up, who held things together, who watched over the people they loved - are now on the receiving end of that same instinct in others. And it turns out the world has been paying attention. It turns out people are ready.

I keep seeing this. I keep being surprised by it, even though by now I probably shouldn't be.

What it means to trust the world with someone you love

I come to trust easily. Almost too easily, if I'm honest - I've extended trust in directions that didn't deserve it, believed the best about people past the point where the evidence was still with me. This is something I've had to learn to hold carefully. Trust as a gift, not a reflex. Discernment as the thing that keeps it from becoming a wound.

And yet. I keep coming back to trust.  Even after it's been broken. Even knowing it will probably be broken again somewhere, by someone, in ways I can't anticipate. I look at the evidence of my life - the people who showed up, the kindness I didn't earn, the hands extended at the exact moment I needed them - and I cannot arrive anywhere other than this: people are, more often than not, trying to be kind.

But trusting the world with myself is a different thing than trusting it with her.

When I am the one in the room, I can read it. I can adjust. I can extend trust and stay alert at the same time, recalibrate if something shifts. I know my own signals. I've learned, sometimes the hard way, when to lean in and when to step back.

When she is the one in the room - and I am not - I have none of that. I cannot watch the room. I cannot read the people in it. I cannot catch anything if it starts to fall.

That is the specific ask of this season. Not whether I trust the world. I do. It's whether I can trust it on her behalf, without being present to manage how that trust unfolds.

And so I keep returning to this: the instinct I have to watch out for her - to notice, to show up, to extend myself toward someone who needs something - that instinct is not mine alone. It lives in other people too. I have been the recipient of it more times than I can count, from people who had no particular reason to care and cared anyway.

She will be the recipient of it too.

And so will our parents - who spent decades being the ones who showed up, who held things together, who watched over the people they loved. They are now on the receiving end of that same instinct in others. And it turns out the world has been paying attention.

That's not certainty. It's not a guarantee. It's a choice - the same one our parents made when they chose the smaller home, the same one made by everyone who has ever loved someone they couldn't follow.

You trust the world with them. And you trust that the world has people in it worth trusting.

That is one of the braver things I know how to do.

A word if you're in this too

Maybe you're a parent at this particular threshold - watching someone you love practice being gone. Maybe you're watching your own parents navigate the wisdom of letting go before they have to. Maybe you're in the middle place, held between two kinds of love that both require something from you.

Maybe you're grieving something else entirely: a relationship, a season of life, a version of yourself you thought you'd get to keep longer.

Whatever the threshold is, I want to say this:

Grief is real. You're not being dramatic. You don't have to hurry it up.

And the HOPE is also real - not as a bypass around the grief, but as something that grows alongside it, sometimes slowly, in the same dark soil.

People are good. Not all of them, not all the time, not in ways that make the world safe in any simple sense. But in the ways that matter for the long haul - the ways that hold us when we are more tender than we expected to be - I have seen it. I keep seeing it.

I am choosing to trust that my daughter will be held by more than just me. I am choosing to trust that our parents will be held by more than just us.

Those beliefs don't erase the ache of watching the taillights disappear, or of watching someone choose the smaller room because they love you enough to make it easy.

But they mean I can go back inside.

And some days, that's enough.

Erin Martinson is a grief coach, spiritual director, and certified Healing Touch Practitioner. She helps people cross thresholds they cannot cross alone — including the ones they didn't know were coming. Learn more about working with Erin at EMBody Wisdom.