The Pivot Year

by Brianna Wiest

Will you continue to replay the memories of yesterday, or will you meet the moment and make the most of what is in front of you now?

create a mosaic of experience—ever-forming, ever-evolving, ever-unfolding, as what’s within unravels into reality,

When you do not know what is next, you enter the realm of infinite potential. Instead of trying to plan your life so safely and so succinctly, you can begin to plan for the moment, the joy, the journey. Instead of living on autopilot, you can learn how to continuously meet the ever-changing, ever-possible now.

Happiness is not having the best of everything, but the ability to make the best of anything. Happiness is knowing you are doing what you can with what you were given. Happiness is not something that comes to you when every problem is solved and all things are perfectly in place, but in the shining silver linings that remind us the light of day is always there, if you slow down enough to notice.

Practice the pause. Widen the space between what you sense and what you do about it. Decide what’s worth your energy, because what you engage with is what you empower.

You cannot desire what you do not already contain.

What you are waiting on is your own willingness to accept the mountain you must climb in order to pull those desires out of the deepest parts of you and create them in the world you already inhabit.

Maybe you don’t need to find more energy, maybe you just need to find a dream that makes you actually want to get up in the morning. Maybe you need to find something that gives back more than it takes. Maybe you need to stop trying to be good at the hundred things that do not light up your soul, and finally choose the one that does—the one that asks you to risk, to lay your heart bare, to try again, even though you’re scared. You’re not failing because you’re not motivated. You’re not supposed to get far on a path that was never yours to walk.

living life to the fullest

just knowing how to be where your feet are. It’s learning how to take care of yourself, how to make a home within your own skin. It’s learning how to build a simple life you are proud of. A life most fully lived is not always composed of the things that rock you awake, but those that slowly assure you it’s okay to slow down. That you don’t always have to prove yourself.

life can only grow outward in proportion to how stable it is inward—that if the joy is not in the little things first, the big things won’t fully find us. 9 Whatever pain you think you are in right now cannot begin to compare to the peace that will one day come over you.

You will become someone who is more capable of appreciating what matters,

You will require a new level of integrity within your life, which will transpire into better boundaries and a more stable foundation.

That the very moment that you honor where you are with complete surrender, you open to the next experience life wants to offer.

What feels on the surface like rejection is often redirection. When you ask for a big life, you cannot keep fighting for a smaller one to stay.

Move toward the people who expand your perimeter of possibility, who believe in your potential just a little bit more than your reality. Move toward the people who remind you of the person you know you’re meant to be, the ones who stretch your soul and make you feel something real. Move toward the people who remind you of what you contain, who help you fall a little more in love with life. Move toward the people who energize you more than they drain you.

I am on my own side.

Be still.

Maybe you should learn to trust in what passes you by so you’ll begin to trust in what lands right in front of you.

Notice what stays. Notice what is constant. Notice what perseveres. These are the things that the song of your life will be composed of.

What matters, in the end, is the way you intend to see yourself.

give the majority of your time to your greatest strengths.

I hope you learn to live in a way that makes you excited for the day ahead, for whatever it is you are meant to do with this period of time, with this corner of the world, with this one body and life that is yours. I hope you learn to experience living, instead of just imagining how your life is seen.

Finding yourself also requires losing who you once thought yourself to be.

Figuring out what’s right for you is acknowledging that different things are right at different times—alignment

What you are longing to bring into the world is also what the world is longing for you to bring it.

You will have to stop trying to make yourself fit into places you are no longer meant to be. If you are going to give your energy to anything, give it to what’s already working. To the people who already love you, to the things that show potential, to the places that make you feel more alive.

Give yourself the time you need to regulate to your new normal,

You will begin to decide what really matters to you, what you actually want to experience while you are alive, and gently, and lovingly, release the rest in time.

You will have to learn that if you are not growing, you are not really living. If you are not moving on from anything, you are not moving toward something.

The people, places and things that phase in and out of your life come to you for a specific purpose, and once their mission is complete, you are able to move onto the next experience.

If you do not know what to do next, it usually isn’t because your next step is far out in the distance, but rather right in front of your feet.

you do not know what to do next, it’s time to learn to be in the answered prayer that is this very day.

You don’t have to predict every possible turn of the future, but strengthen your faith in the fact that you will be taken care of no matter where you find yourself along the way.

You are here to nurture the feeling a life most fully lived would give you in your chest, not what you imagine it would appear in someone else’s eyes.

You must learn to see yourself with kinder eyes.

You become who you really are when you start choosing the things that you actually find meaningful and worthwhile.

When we deny ourselves the authentic experience of being alive, we reach for more when what we really want is not to stretch wider, but to go deeper.

In everything you choose, you must first ask: but what will this do to my soul?

When you go outside, how beautiful is the flower?

If we find the resilience to make peace with the unknown, to not require every answer to keep moving forward, to believe that everything will work out one way or another—we begin to live more completely in the moment, releasing the illusions that had been clouding us all along.

You have to keep moving in the direction of your dreams.

You will not truly feel settled until you have done what you came here to do.

To love someone is to allow

It is to honor their path and their ability to choose how they want to spend their time and their life.

Maybe this part of your journey is about observing—studying the world you want to be a part of, the experiences you want to have, the person you want to be.

There is nothing scarier than the idea of leaving what is good for the hope of what may be exceptional.

You don’t have to trust in what you cannot yet see, but be willing to give yourself wholly to this moment and let it transform you in the ways it’s trying to. You know more than you think you do.

This is what it means to be fully alive—not to always know where you are headed, but to know that eventually, you will arrive.

true joy is using what you have, being where you are, and loving the souls who have chosen to walk with you.