How to Find Hope in a Transition You Didn’t Choose

You don’t have to call a painful experience a blessing to leave room for what may grow from it.

Issue 179, August 7, 2026 ✨ Higher Power Coaching & Consulting ✨

My theme for August is transitions and resetting routines. Over the next four weeks, we’re going to explore what happens when life changes, especially when we didn’t choose the change. We’ll look at how transitions can cause us to question our identity, how to get clear about what we want in the next phase of our lives and how to build routines that help us stay connected to ourselves as we move toward an uncertain future.

But before we can talk about who we’re becoming or what we want to create next, we need to talk about what happens when life changes the course we thought we were on.

Sometimes our transitions begin by conscious choice: we leave a job, end a relationship, move to a new place, or choose something different. Other transitions are foisted on us:  something happens that’s unfair, frightening, humiliating, or devastating, and suddenly the life we planned is down the tubes.

When that happens, others often rush in with advice about how to focus on silver linings. They say things like, “Everything happens for a reason” (which I don’t believe – I believe we can make meaning out of things, but there’s no inherent reason embedded in things for us to find), “It was meant to be,” “One day you’ll be grateful this happened.” Even when words like those are offered lovingly, they can feel dismissive because they ask us to skip over what hurts right now.

We don’t have to pretend that something painful is a blessing. We don’t have to be grateful for trauma, loss, disappointment, or disruption. But I do believe we can acknowledge that we don’t yet know the whole story.

The accident that seemed to ruin everything

In 1998, I was a graduate student at the University of Connecticut and worked as a graduate assistant in the Office of Institutional Research (i.e., I was broke A.F.). I was driving a seven-year-old Geo Metro that was paid off, got incredible gas mileage, and was exactly the kind of car a broke graduate student needed. I hoped to keep driving it for at least a few more years.

One morning in April, on my way to work, a diesel pickup truck driven by someone on the university’s landscaping crew hit me. My tiny car rolled over and landed upright. I remember being upside down and seeing that I was heading toward a telephone pole. Somehow, I didn’t hit it. I walked away with nothing more than a scrape on my neck from the seat belt.

It was a miracle that I wasn’t killed or seriously injured. And I was furious! I don’t believe I’ve ever been that angry in my life before or since.

The accident wasn’t my fault, but I was the one left chasing down the insurance information, renting a car, and figuring out how I could possibly afford another vehicle. My paid off car was totaled. At the time, I didn’t experience the accident as the beginning of a beautiful new chapter. I experienced it as one more financial crisis in a period when I was already struggling.

Because I needed the lowest monthly payment possible, I decided to lease a new car. While completing the financing paperwork, I told the finance manager, Jeff, how miraculous it was that I’d survived the accident with only a scrape. He told me that he’d also survived a serious accident. That conversation led to another conversation about coincidences, spirituality, and a book called Conversations with God.

I bought the book on my way home and read it over the weekend. By Monday, I had gone from being a lifelong agnostic to believing in a God of my own understanding. The conception of God I read about in the book made sense to me and explained things to me in ways nothing else ever had. It didn’t erase all the hypocrisy and harm I’d seen done in the name of religion, but it opened a spiritual door I hadn’t known was there.

The change I couldn’t see yet

A few months later, a friend arranged for me to attend an intensive seminar on resumes and interviewing. During one exercise, we had to find a newspaper ad for a job we were qualified for so we could practice writing a cover letter. I found a social research position in New Haven that was perfect for me on paper, but I didn’t intend to take it. It paid less than I wanted, and New Haven was more than an hour away. I applied only for the experience.

Then I got an interview. Eventually, I got the job.

There is no way I would have accepted a job that required that commute if I still had my old Geo Metro. But I had a reliable new car because of the accident, so I said yes. That decision changed the entire trajectory of my life.

The job became the beginning of my career. I eventually moved to New Haven, where I still live and which I love. I met people through work, church, and volunteering who shared my desire to make their lives and the world better. I created new friendships and a new way of life. The spiritual opening that began after the accident eventually deepened enormously when I entered 12-step recovery 17 years later.

None of that makes the accident itself good. Of course it didn’t. It was frightening, disruptive, and financially destabilizing. I didn’t need to deny any of that to realize that accident was a pivotal moment in my life.

It took years before I could see that, though. While I was standing in the wreckage, all I could see was the wreckage. And I was angry.

You don’t have to know what it means yet

This is one of the hardest things about an unwanted transition: we want to know what it means while we’re still living it. We want to know that everything will work out, what to do next, and proof that we’re making the right choices. Personally, I’d rather KNOW that something negative was going to happen than not know what’s coming, because uncertainty feels so unsafe.

We may decide that a loss proves we’re a failure, a rejection proves we’re not good enough, or the disruption proves we’re on the wrong path. Our minds want to close the story with a shitty meaning because a terrible explanation can feel more manageable than no explanation at all. Ugh.

But a painful moment is not the same thing as the final meaning of that moment.

I understand now that internal safety doesn’t come from knowing how everything will turn out. It comes from learning that I can stay connected to myself while I don’t know. I can tend to what hurts, take the next right action, ask for help, rest when the emotional work exhausts me, and allow the meaning of the experience to unfold over time.

This is why the phrase “In uncertainty lies hope” has become so meaningful to me. Uncertainty contains everything we fear might happen, but it also contains every possibility we can’t even imagine! Every unexpected friendship, opportunity, healing experience, people we’ll love and new direction begins in a future we can’t see.

That doesn’t mean we use hope to override grief or try to expedite our grief. It means grief and hope are allowed to exist together.

When the first thing doesn’t work

I originally recorded the podcast episode that inspired this article during a painful business disappointment. I’d spent months recruiting for a group coaching program I believed in deeply, and only one person registered. It took the wind out of my sails. I was meditating more, sleeping more, and doing an enormous amount of emotional work just to keep myself open to possibility.

I recorded the episode partly to remind myself that I had lived through this before. I had experienced something that looked like a disaster and later discovered that it had redirected my life in ways I could never have planned.

Looking back now, I can see something I couldn’t see clearly then: staying open to possibility is not the same thing as forcing myself to be positive. Sometimes the best thing I can do to honor myself when something disappointing happens is to admit, “I’m disappointed.” Sometimes the routine I need to reset is not my work schedule or morning practice. It’s the life-long routine I had of overriding my feelings, demanding that I recover quickly, or measuring the value of what I created by whether other people responded the way I hoped.

A transition often begins before we know what we’re transitioning into. There may be a space where the old plan has fallen apart and the new direction hasn’t yet appeared. That space in between is uncomfortable, but it’s not empty. It’s where we grieve, listen, learn, and begin to notice possibilities we couldn’t see while we were committed to the original plan.

What to do while you’re waiting to see

If you’re in the middle of something that feels bad right now, you don’t have to convince yourself that it is somehow good and you should be grateful for it and immediately seek silver linings. You also don’t have to decide that it’s ruined everything.

You can tell the truth about what happened. You can let yourself be angry, frightened, disappointed, or sad. You can care for the part of you that wants certainty and reassurance. You can think about what you need today, without demanding that you know what this experience will mean in the future.

You also don’t have to turn the present moment into a permanent conclusion. Instead of saying, “This ruined my life,” you might say, “This changed the life I thought I was going to have, and I don’t yet know where that change will lead.” Instead of insisting, “This happened for a reason,” you might say, “I’m willing to be open to the possibility that something meaningful may eventually grow from this.”

That isn’t denial. It’s humility about how little of the story we can see while we’re living it.

The car accident that made me feel as if my life had been thrown into chaos became the event that led me toward spirituality, my career, New Haven, and an entirely new community and life. I couldn’t have seen any of that from the ambulance I was in after the accident.

If your life has changed in a way you didn’t choose, you may not be able to see what comes next either. For now, your task is not to declare the change a blessing. It’s to stay connected to yourself while being uncertain and remember that the part of the story you can see is not necessarily the whole story.