I used to do this thing when I moved to a new city. I would get in the car, pick a direction, and just drive. No destination, no plan, no idea where the street was going. That was the whole point. The not-knowing was the adventure.

But — and this is the part I haven’t always admitted out loud — I wasn’t totally without a compass. I’d keep an eye on where the sun was sitting. If it was late afternoon and I wanted to head east, I just made sure that warm orange glow was shrinking in my rear-view mirror. That was all I needed. Not a map. Not a route. Just one orienting truth I could trust when everything else was unfamiliar.

It was the same in the woods. I’d see a trail branching off — the kind that isn’t on any map, the kind that might lead somewhere wonderful or might just peter out into brambles — and I’d take it. Always turning right on the way in. Which meant I could always find my way back by turning left. Simple. Enough.

I’ve been thinking about that lately. Because right now, in a different kind of way, I’m at one of those junctions again.

I. The Comfortable Dead End

There’s something I know about myself, and it’s not always comfortable to sit with: I can feel when standing still has stopped being rest and started being avoidance. It has a particular texture — a kind of padded, muffled quality to the days. Safe. Fine. Not bad. Just… not leading anywhere I actually chose.

The tricky thing is that this kind of stuckness rarely announces itself dramatically. It doesn’t feel like crisis. It feels like Tuesday. The habits are intact, the routines hold, nothing is visibly wrong. And yet something in me knows — has known for a while — that I am keeping myself comfortable precisely so I don’t have to reckon with what I actually want next.

I tell myself: there’s no such thing as a dead end. Something will show up. And that’s true, actually — something always does. But here’s the question I keep coming back to, the one that has a little edge to it: is it what I want to have show up? Or am I just waiting to see what finds me, because choosing feels like too much of a risk?

II. What Joyce Sees That I Recognise

When I read that line from Rachel Joyce, something in me went very quiet for a moment. Not because it was new information. Because it named something I already knew and had been talking myself out of.

The miracle she’s pointing at isn’t the arrival. It isn’t the moment everything becomes clear, the plan crystallises, the path reveals itself in full. It’s the earlier, messier, more frightening thing: the reaching. The trying to find a way — present tense, ongoing, uncertain — when you genuinely don’t know if you can get there.

That’s the part that costs something. Anyone can move confidently toward a known destination. What takes something different — something closer to courage, or faith, or just sheer stubborn refusal to stay put — is moving when the destination isn’t confirmed. When you might be wrong. When you can’t promise yourself or anyone else that this is going to work out.

III. I Don’t Need the Whole Map

Here’s what I learned from those drives through unfamiliar cities, those unmarked trails in the woods: I don’t need certainty. I never needed the whole map. I just needed one thing I could trust — the sun in the mirror, the left-turn rule — and the rest could stay beautifully, usefully unknown.

That’s not recklessness. It’s actually a quite sophisticated relationship with not-knowing. It says: I accept that I can’t see the whole route. I accept I might need to turn around. But I have enough of an inner compass to take the next step, and that — it turns out — is sufficient.

I think that’s what trying looks like, for me. Not a leap into the void. Not throwing out everything that gives me orientation. But picking up enough of a bearing — even just the direction of what feels alive and true — and letting that be enough to begin.

IV. A Mix of All Three, Honestly

If you asked me right now whether I’m already trying, or still circling, or working up to it — the honest answer is all three. Simultaneously. On different fronts and at different depths. Which used to feel like failure to me, like I should be further along, more decided, more committed. These days I’m a little gentler about it.

Because trying isn’t one clean moment of departure. It’s a series of small internal movements — some of them barely visible from the outside — in the direction of what you actually want. Sometimes it’s a decision. Sometimes it’s just refusing, one more time, to settle for the comfortable thing that is quietly leading nowhere.

And sometimes it’s just writing it down. Saying out loud: I know I’m at a junction. I know the sun is somewhere behind me. I know which way I want to turn.

That, too, is a kind of trying. And if Joyce is right — and I think she is — it’s already a small miracle.