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Therefore what? The site’s closing question, handed to you — with what we can tell you about the road, what we cannot, and what we believe we will learn from you when you walk it.

We were going to call this post Therefore what? — but we worried you might not get past the title.

Between the two of us, that phrase has come to mean something. When one of us has read or seen or heard something that has changed how we are thinking, the other will ask, therefore what? It is shorthand for a whole cluster of questions. What are you going to do with this? What is going to change? What will you carry forward? Who will you become because of it? The phrase has come to mean something has just been said, and the implications matter.

That is the question we want to ask you now.

Therefore what?

You may have read posts from every phase of this journey. You may have read only a few. This may be the first piece of writing on the site you have come to, or it may be the last. However you arrived here, you have arrived at a piece of writing that asks something of you — and we want to ask it directly. Therefore what?

We do not mean what’s next. That is sequential. We mean therefore what. What does any of this mean for you today? Tomorrow? For the rest of your life?

We do not know where you are reading this from, and we want to talk to you wherever that is.

Where you are

You may be in Innocence. Your marriage is young or untouched, and most of what we have written about has not happened to you. You came to this site through curiosity or through someone who recommended it, and you are reading from a place where the descent and the fall are still words on a page rather than chapters of your life. Welcome.

You may be in the Pit. You are reading this from the spare room you have been sleeping in for three months, the papers signed but the grief still arriving in waves you did not expect. You are not sure you are going to survive this. You are not sure what survive even means. You are not alone here. We have been where you are.

You may be in the Ascent. You have been doing the work for a year, or three, or seven. The acute pain is mostly behind you. The harder, slower work of climbing is in front of you, and some days you are not sure you have the patience for it. Keep walking. The patience comes from the walking, not before it.

You may be in Becoming, without having known the word for it. You have come further than you ever expected to come. You are not the person who began this journey. The question that keeps surfacing now is not whether you can heal but what you are for. The questions you are asking now are the right ones. Stay with them.

We see you. Each of you. The road ahead is not the same for any two of you, and it will not be the same as ours. We are writing to you anyway, wherever you are.

What we cannot tell you, and what we can

We cannot tell you what is ahead for you specifically. We cannot tell you what becoming will look like in a life shaped by your particular history, or what charity will produce in the rooms you walk into, or what you will see in your own life that we cannot see from here.

But there is much we can tell you.

There is reason to hope. The patterns are real. The arc we have traced across this site — through disillusionment and the fall, through the choices and the ascent, through becoming and into holiness — is not something we invented. It is something we walked through and recognized, and that others have walked through before us, and that you are walking through now. The path is real.

You can make choices. You can learn to do, and then to become, and then to witness things you cannot currently imagine. It is possible to be happier than you have ever been — not in spite of what you have walked through, but partly because of it. There is reason to feel awe, even if you cannot yet see what that awe will land on. And the things that make your story unique — the particular history, the particular pain, the particular hope — will create unique strengths and unique gifts that the rest of us will need from you.

We could not have pictured this future. The marriage we are in now was not visible to either of us from where we used to stand. The peace was not visible. The good conversations, the friendships that have arrived, the years still in front of us — none of it could have been imagined from where we were. But it was real. It was real before we could see it. It was waiting.

That is what we can tell you. The path is real. The arrival is real. The becoming is real. We have walked into it ourselves and we are still walking, and we know what the territory holds.

What you will teach us

We believe we can learn from you, personally. Not from people-in-general, not from some imagined reader — from you, whoever you are, wherever you are reading this from. Your life is going to be surprising. You are going to discover things you cannot currently imagine. You are going to help people you have not met yet. And some of what you discover will be things we need.

We are not asking this from a place of having arrived. We are still being taught right now — by a friend who recently joined us for lunch, whose road forward we cannot guide and whose discoveries we are waiting to learn from; by our granddaughter, who has already taught us things we did not know we needed to learn and who is becoming in ways we are watching with our hearts wide open; by an older friend who came to us in his own seeking and ended up teaching us how to listen; by our daughter, whose work is helping people ask the question this post is asking, and from whom we are still learning how to ask it of ourselves.

You are one of them. We do not know your road, but we will need what you learn on it.

And you are already teaching people. The people in your life — the ones who love you, the ones who are watching you, the ones whose paths cross yours — are already learning from you, often without your noticing and sometimes without theirs. The teaching has already started. We just want to be among the ones receiving it.

This is not an obligation we are placing on you. It is something we believe about you. The people we have learned the most from are often the ones who believed they had the least to offer. If you ever want to tell us what you have found, we would like to know.

If you are reading this from alongside

You may not be in any of the places we have described. You may be watching someone you love walk a road you cannot walk for them — your child, your sibling, your friend, your parent. You may be watching them in the Pit and praying they survive it. You may be watching them in the Ascent, wanting to help and not knowing how. You may be watching them in Becoming and not recognizing the person they are turning into.

This post is hope for you, too. Not only for the one you love.

You are not powerless. The presence you offer — the prayers, the sitting with, the saying the wrong thing and then the right thing and then the wrong thing again — is part of what their road is made of. And what you will learn from walking alongside them is real, and ours to learn from as well, when you find words for it.

What is ahead

You cannot see all of it from where you are standing. Neither could we from where we stood.

But here is what we have come to believe: that what is ahead of you is larger than you can currently imagine. Not because it has not happened yet, but because it has been there all along, waiting for you to come into view of it. Like the full night sky on a moonless evening far from any city — always there, always vast, always full of more than you can take in at once, and most of your life unable to see it because the conditions for seeing it have not yet aligned.

The conditions are starting to align. The reading you are doing, the work you have done, the choices you have made or are about to make — these are not the destination. They are what brings you into position to begin to see.

There are people you have not met yet who will change your life and be changed by yours. There are conversations you have not had yet that will reshape what you understand about yourself. There are versions of you that are real and waiting — that the you of today cannot see, because the seeing requires the becoming.

This is what we wish for you. More to learn. More to become. More to be.

Not as a closing line. As a horizon.

There is always more.

We meant the question. Where do you go from here?

If you have an answer, or part of one, or just something you have been carrying that this post brought to the surface — we would like to hear it. Comments are moderated with kindness.

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