When I wander through the forest, the trees demand my attention. Especially here on the west coast, where trees can stretch more than 90 metres into the sky and be as wide as 20 metres in circumference, I am dwarfed by their massive expanse. I often stop to stand in awe of them, gazing up to their dizzying heights.

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I was reading something this weekend about pain and how it’s the body’s way of telling us there’s something we need to pay attention to. And then I thought… it works for the heart and the mind too.

“So… what made you move to Shawnigan Lake?”

It’s one of the most common questions I get from people I encounter in the tiny village I moved to at the edge of a lake on Vancouver Island. “It was time for a change,” I say, or “I’ve been wandering since I sold my house in Winnipeg, and this felt like the next right thing,” or “My kids all grew up and moved away so I thought it was my turn for an adventure,” or “I wanted a place with gentler winters.”

My name is Krista and that, over there on the left, the one smiling at you kindly from her writing desk on the West Coast of Canada, is Heather, my business partner-slash-work-wife.

I’m holed up right now in the office I have at my church here in Winnipeg (located almost in the dead-centre of Canada, a couple hours drive straight north from North Dakota in the  U.S.A.). In addition to helping run the Centre, I am currently also employed by Good News Fellowship as their Leadership Coordinator (I basically do all the pastor-type things except preach).

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“I don’t know who I am. I’ve shaped my life around other people for so long that I’ve lost sight of myself.” I used to hear some version of that sentiment quite regularly, ten years ago when more of my work involved coaching people. It was especially common among women in the 40-60 age range – women who’d spent years raising children, holding a marriage together, and/or building a career.

“You need to pause to let joy in.” Those words popped into my head one day last week while I was sitting on the couch, weary after a long day of book-launch-related tasks, which followed several long days of gathering the things I need to make a home and unpacking them into the cupboards and closets of my new place.

Pause to let joy in? I was puzzled at first, and then suddenly I understood what my internal wise guide (which I call Tenderness) was trying to say to me. I hadn’t been pausing much in recent weeks, staying busy nearly all day every day. Moving across the country, launching a book, trying to keep a business afloat, re-launching a course – ALL. OF. THE. THINGS. Even when I had some moments when there was nothing that needed to be done, I was rarely truly pausing – at least not in a mindful way. I was mostly just filling those moments with mindless stuff, like endless episodes of Real Housewives (don’t judge me).

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“By the end of the week, we’ll have turned you into a blues band.” Gulp. I could feel the anxiety rise when I heard those words. A blues band?! Me?! I have no musical talent and my Mennonite body is rhythmically stunted from all of those “dancing is sin” messages I heard growing up. How could I contribute to a blues band?

That statement still stands as one of the most intimidating things I’ve ever heard from the facilitator of a leadership workshop. Not surprisingly, it also turned out to be one of the most life-changing. Of course, in order for it to become life-changing, I had to get out of my own way first. I had to loosen my grip on some beliefs about myself and be willing to be uncomfortable for a while. By the end of the week, I had indeed written a verse for a blues song and performed it together with a rag-tag bunch of other equally intimidated participants over dinner in front of hundreds of people.

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For many and varied reasons, 2023 was a hard year. I’m fairly confident that that was true for a lot of people. The first ‘post-pandemic’ year marked what felt like a desperate fervour to ‘get back to normal’ – despite the war in Ukraine grinding on, despite the climate crisis becoming more obvious and keen, despite growing political division and fascist ideologies becoming accepted and implemented world-wide, despite the ever-tenuous Israel-Palestine situation literally exploding and turning into little more than death and destruction (not to mention other areas of the world that got less press), despite rapid inflation and deep economic hardship for everyone but the richest of us, despite the fact that COVID is not, in fact, finished mutating and harming us. This last year it has felt like the whole globe is in one giant humanitarian crisis all of the time. There’s literally nowhere to go to escape tragedy.