I once assumed that the important trials of life would make themselves obvious, that they would announce their arrival with noise, tension, and perhaps even witnesses.
I now suspect the opposite.
The days that ask the most of us often look unremarkable. One wakes up, works, reads a few pages, writes a few lines, goes for a walk, speaks kindly or impatiently, and then sleeps. Nothing happens, except that something is happening.
I am learning that this season is not measuring my abilities so much as my disposition. Whether I can remain patient without reassurance. Whether I can labor without the pleasure of being seen laboring. Whether I can endure the smallness of ordinary effort.
It is not failure I fear most, but fatigue of the spirit. The kind that persuades a man that unnoticed work is wasted work.
And yet, when I consult my own experience, it is precisely in these unnoticed hours that I have been most quietly formed.