What would my life look like if I had not lived from fear?

Recently, old pain touched me unexpectedly. It hit hard. Instead of turning away, I sat with it. For almost three hours I wrote, spoke, felt and asked myself questions. Until I could not only see, but also feel what had truly been touched within me.

Gradually, the emotional charge shifted. I could look again from the present, rather than from what had been stirred within me. To me, that is transformation.

The word comes from the Latin transformare: trans can mean 'beyond' or 'through', and formare means 'to give form'. I see transformation as a bridge between the form our life has taken through experiences, fears and beliefs, and a new form that is not yet fixed.

Crossing that bridge takes courage. We leave the certainty of what we know without knowing what the other side will be like. Not because everything behind us must disappear, but because it no longer needs to determine the place from which we act today.

From there, we can create from the present. We are here to remember, to learn and to experience.