The wisdom of not knowing where you are going

Magnus Östberg

Trust your inner season

On trusting the cycles of your own life

You have lived long enough to know that things come and go.

Energy rises and falls. Relationships that once burned bright grow quiet. Projects that consumed you are finished and forgotten. The child you once were has vanished into the adult you became. The strength you had at twenty is not the same strength you carry now.

And yet we resist this. 

We want to hold the peak, the moment of fullness, the height of bloom. 

We want spring without autumn. 

Growth without decline. 

We want the outbreath without the inbreath, the rising tide without the falling.

We treat the low points of our lives as problems to solve, the quiet stretches as proof that we are falling behind, the fallow seasons as failures of discipline or imagination. 

We look at someone else’s spring 

from the middle of our winter and 

conclude that we are doing it wrong.

But a life is not a straight line. 

It never was. 

It is a series of turns, of risings and settlings, of expansions that reach their furthest point and then, without anyone deciding it, come home.

Watch a garden through the year: in spring, everything pushes upward. Green shoots breaking through the soil, buds swelling on branches, life insisting on itself with a kind of urgency that borders on recklessness. Summer arrives and the garden is full, lush, heavy with fruit and flower. Then, almost imperceptibly, the turn begins. Leaves yellow. Stems dry. Petals fall. By late autumn, the garden looks like a place abandoned.

But it is not abandoned. 

Beneath the surface, roots are deepening. 

Seeds are settling into the earth. 

The garden is not dying. 

It is gathering its energy back toward the center, toward the source, toward the quiet place from which it will rise again.

Every living thing does this. Every breath does this. Every heartbeat, expansion then contraction. Outward then inward. Flourishing then returning.

Lao Tzu saw this rhythm everywhere. 

In Chapter 16 of the Tao Te Ching, he watches the ten thousand beings rise and fall, bloom and withdraw, and he names this movement the most fundamental in all of existence: 

“After having been in a flourishing state, each of them returns to its origin. 

To return to one’s origin is called being at rest. 

Being at rest is called returning to life.”

This is the great surprise. 

We might expect the return to be called death, or ending, or dissolution. 

Instead, Lao Tzu calls it returning to life. 

As if true life is not the outward flourishing but the inward homecoming. 

As if the root is more alive than the flower.

I explored this passage in depth, and what struck me most was how directly it 

speaks to the seasons we go through as human beings, not just the seasons of the year, but the seasons of a single life, a single relationship, a single project, a single day.

The seasons inside us

We all carry an inner calendar, and it rarely matches the one on the wall.

You can be in the dead of personal winter while everyone around you celebrates. 

You can feel the first stirrings of spring in the middle of November. 

You can be in full summer, producing, creating, pouring yourself into the world, while the person next to you has entered a long autumn of letting go.

Our culture has this deep bias toward ascent: 

We celebrate growth, expansion, productivity, progress. 

We have built entire industries around the promise of perpetual upward movement, and we have internalized this promise so completely that any descent feels like a personal failing.

When energy drops, we reach for caffeine or motivation or a new goal. 

When a relationship enters its quiet season, we wonder if we have fallen out of love. 

When creative inspiration fades, we diagnose ourselves with burnout or block, as if the absence of production were a disease requiring treatment.

But the descent is not a disease. It is half the cycle. 

And a cycle that only goes up is not a cycle at all. 

It is an escalation, and escalations, by their nature, eventually break.

I wrote recently about discernment, about learning to tell the difference between what we desire and what we genuinely need. The same discernment applies here. 

When you are in a fallow season, the question is not 

“how do I get out of this?” 

The question is 

“what is this season asking of me?”

Sometimes the answer is rest. 

Sometimes it is grief. 

Sometimes it is a patience so radical it feels like doing nothing at all.

And sometimes, the answer is simply: be here. 

Stop reaching for the next season. 

Let this one do its work.

The wisdom of not knowing where you are going

You do not need to know what comes next.

You do not need to be in a different season than the one you are in. 

You do not need to match anyone else’s rhythm, anyone else’s timeline, anyone else’s idea of where you should be by now.

You only need to ask, honestly and without judgment: 

What is this season? And can I let it be the season it is?

Because every season carries its own intelligence. 

Every phase of the cycle knows what it is doing, even when we do not. 

And the more we resist, the longer the season lasts. 

The more we fight the winter, the further we push the spring.

There is a particular kind of courage required to be in the middle of a cycle without knowing where it leads.

We are comfortable with beginnings, they carry the energy of promise, and we are comfortable with completions, they carry the satisfaction of arrival. 

But the middle is harder. 

The long stretch of winter where nothing seems to move. The plateau after an initial burst of growth. The quiet years of a relationship that has outgrown its early fire but has not yet discovered what it will become.

Zhuangzi tells of a tree so gnarled and twisted that no carpenter would touch it. 

It was useless, by every measure of productivity. And because it was useless, it survived. It grew old. It provided shade for generations. 

Its very refusal to be useful was what allowed it to fulfill its deepest nature.

There is a teaching in this for the seasons we cannot explain. 

The periods of our lives that do not look like progress, that produce no visible results, that would make a terrible social media post. 

These seasons may be doing the most important work of all, if we can resist the urge to rush past them.

I explored a version of this in a recent essay on staying human in noisy times, where I described how the world close to us, the kitchen, the table, the breath, is not a distraction from the real world but the ground of it. 

The same is true of the quiet seasons. 

They are not detours from your real life. 

They are the soil in which your real life takes root.

Everything returns

The Tao Te Ching promises this, and every living thing confirms it: 

What goes out comes back. What falls will rise. What empties will fill again.

Not in the same form. 

Not on your schedule. 

Not in the way you imagined.

But it returns.

The woman who lost her creative fire and thought it was gone forever sits down one evening, for no reason she can name, and writes a sentence that surprises her. 

The friendship that went quiet for two years finds its voice again over a meal neither person planned. The body that failed and frightened you learns a new way to carry you, different from before, perhaps slower, but still here, still yours.

I wrote about appreciation recently, about the practice of seeing what is already present. 

The cycles teach us something similar, but across time rather than across space. 

They teach us that what disappears is not always lost. 

That absence is sometimes the necessary prelude to a deeper presence. 

That the seed is not less alive than the flower. It is simply alive in a way we cannot see.

And perhaps that is the deepest invitation of the cycles:

To trust what we cannot see.

To let the descent be as sacred as the climb.

in, Words of Taoism