It’s a season of change; it’s scary but also beautiful

Photo: Gerald Farinas.

Lately, it feels like the air is thick with the scent of departure and arrival. When I look around at the people in my life and the stories filling my community, I see a pattern of upheaval that feels almost magnetic. It is as if a collective timer went off, signaling that the lives we were living are no longer large enough to hold us.

I see people leaving careers they spent a decade building to start something entirely different, pivoting from the corporate world to the creative or the opposite even. I see people stepping out of long-term relationships that had become part of their identity, moving toward new connections that feel more aligned with who they are today.

It is a season of wholesale change, and while I am observing it from my own vantage point, it feels like a universal shift. It’s happening to a lot of us, together, all at once.

In my experience as an Asian American, there is often a heavy emphasis on the long game. We are taught to value endurance and the steady climb up a single ladder. To pivot or to let go can sometimes feel like breaking a silent contract with the past.

But what I am, or we are, witnessing right now transcends any single culture. There is a prophetic quality to this mass movement. It is as if the universe is conducting a grand symphony of redirection.

When so many people simultaneously feel the urge to scrap the old blueprint and start over, it suggests that the old structures are simply no longer viable. We are being ushered into a new way of existing, one that values authenticity over sheer longevity.

Part of this shift involves the perception that others are walking away. When we are the ones being left behind, whether by a friend who has changed or a partner who no longer sees a future, it can feel like a judgment on our own worth. It triggers that deep-seated fear of being discarded. In a cultural context where community and belonging are everything, having someone exit your life can feel like a breach of safety.

Yet, there is a poetic necessity in these departures. Often, when people walk away, they are responding to a celestial frequency we haven't quite tuned into yet. For those who believe in God, it might be God doing what must be. Their exit is not a critique of who we are, but a signal that the energetic contract between us has to be renewed into something different.

This transition is what I was taught to call by a Loyola philosophy professor the architecture of the wilderness. This wilderness is that strange, quiet territory between the person you were and the person you are becoming.

For those watching their friends move on or their industries transform, like I’m seeing, it can feel like being an immigrant in time. You are leaving the old country of your previous habits and entering a land where the rules haven't been written yet.

This is where psychological resilience becomes our most important tool. It isn't the resilience of pushing through pain, but the resilience of staying soft and open while the world shifts. It is the ability to stand in the unknown without rushing to fill the void with the first thing that looks like safety.

There is a beauty in this pruning process, even when it is someone else holding the shears. As people fade out and new faces walk in, the social landscape of our lives begins to reflect our internal growth.

We are learning that some relationships were meant for a specific season of our evolution, and letting them go, or being let go of, is an act of respect for what they once were.

This season is a bridge. It is taking us away from a life of shoulds and moving us toward a life of is.

While the scale of the change is staggering, it is also a profound liberation. We are all being given the chance to refashion our lives from the ground up, but know that the foundations are still there. You, or I should say we, are those foundations for each other.