You’re in an elevator, moving from one level to another.

Sometimes the elevator goes to a higher level.
Sometimes it goes to a lower one.
You won’t know until you get there.

You are in that aimless time between one chapter of your life and the next.
You are moving from a predictable past to an unpredictable future.
You are in that foreign place
between knowing who you are,
and then knowing again.

It’s that place between the person you were and the person you soon will be.

It is that space where you have no ambition beyond self-awareness,
no hunger other than to feel passion, no plan except to find a plan.

It can be a disorienting, disheartening limbo.

But have no fear. Sooner or later those elevator doors will open and you will embrace your future with the capable hands and arms you brought with you.

Marcus Aurelius wrote you a note nearly 2,000 years ago. It says, ‘Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.’

But 200 years before Marcus Aurelius, Seneca left you his recipe for happiness.

Here, let me read it to you.

‘True happiness,’ said Seneca, ‘is to enjoy the present without anxious dependence on the future.’

And Bobby McFerrin said, ‘Amen.’