Have you ever felt lost in the middle of everyday life?
Between work deadlines, practical responsibilities, and the quiet distance between where you are and where you hoped to be — have you ever looked up and wondered when you drifted off course?
This chapter is not written from a podium.
It is written as a conversation.
Perhaps we have walked similar roads.
Perhaps we are striving in different places, under different conditions.
The battlefields may not look the same —
but beneath the surface, our inner landscapes often mirror one another more than we realise.
The Chariot is often seen as a card of strength, determination, and forward motion.
And yet, because it carries so much momentum, I want to approach it differently — not with force, but with stillness.
To pause.
To observe.
To reflect.
To slow down for a moment with you, right here, in the midst of fatigue, busyness, resistance, and the constant pressure to move forward.
To listen — not to strategy, but to the voice beneath it all.
If you have read my earlier journals, you know this is not the first time I have lost my way.
I have wandered, again and again.
And again and again, I have found myself — not by avoiding loss, but by learning how to return.
I am thirty-five this year.
They say thirty is for standing firm, forty for clarity. I find myself somewhere in between — carrying enough independence to see clearly, and enough experience to no longer cling to who I thought I had to be.
I am not someone who no longer gets lost.
I am someone who no longer feeds the fear of getting lost.
There is a difference.
I have become calmer within change — not emotionally numb, but internally anchored. My emotions have softened too, not because life has become easier, but because I have learned to allow them.
We are human.
We are attached.
We carry longing, grief, joy, preference, and private burdens no one else fully understands.
Emotion is not weakness — it is the body’s way of responding to lived experience. So I let myself feel. Even when the process is not pleasant.
Pain and joy both deserve space.
Both deserve respect.
There were years when my life looked like constant motion.
Walking to ship parcels 3–5 days a week in every season myself, regardless of weather or weight.
Living in a small flat without natural light, so setting up lamps in my hallway or bedroom just to photograph crystals for listings.
Running healing sessions. Answering messages. Learning to build a website myself because hiring help felt impossible. Staying up until two or three in the morning to make things work. Waking up to feed my cat before realising I had forgotten to eat again.
Living alone in a foreign city for years — so busy surviving that I barely noticed the place I lived.
I don’t quite know how I got through it.
At first, I was emerging from depression.
Then came debt — debt I did not create alone, but carried alone after former business partners left the moment they needed to pay their liability.
I took responsibility and kept moving.
Many people might call this madness.
Was I mad to build a crystal business on my own?
To work beyond full-time hours for years?
To use most of what I earned to repay debts born from misplaced trust?
Was I mad to live on less than minimum income while investing everything else into learning, healing, and serving others?
Was I mad to drift across the sea for thirteen years, relying on no one?
To cry to no one?
To keep believing after disappointment in people?
Was I mad to walk with physical difficulty since illness at thirteen, yet never ask for special treatment?
Was I mad to leave home at twenty and live fourteen of the next fifteen years alone — until one small cat finally became my family?
And still, to believe that somewhere in this world, there are souls meant to meet me?
Perhaps.
But this is what I know:
As long as I did not abandon my faith —
each breath brought me closer to my blessing.
I was exhausted.
And I was also deeply fortunate.
Because I did not give up on myself.
I did not give up on meaning.
And slowly, unmistakably, life began to respond.
Old wounds did not disappear — they transformed into strength.
Experience accumulated into wisdom.
What once hurt became compassion, guiding how I listen, feel, respect, and meet others along this path.
The Chariot is not about rushing forward.
It is about continuing — with integrity — even when the road is uneven.
And sometimes, continuing means stopping.
If you are tired, pause.
Rest is not failure.
Stillness is also a form of movement.
If this chapter finds you at the right moment, I hope it lights a small lamp for you — a Chariot’s light.
Not to push you faster.
But to remind you that you are already moving.
One breath at a time.
One choice at a time.
Forward does not always look dramatic.
Sometimes, it simply looks like not giving up.
