The Passing

It didn’t start as a realization.
It started as a feeling.

Somewhere after Easter—not on the day itself,
but in the quiet that followed—I noticed something shifting.

Not dramatically.
Not in a way I could point to.

Just… a sense that something in me was beginning again.

And at first, I thought it was mine.

My renewal.
My return.
My moment of coming back to life
after whatever winter I had been carrying.

But the longer I sat with it,
the less it felt like something I created…
and the more it felt like something I had stepped into.

And once I noticed that, other things began to surface.

Not all at once.
Not in a clean line.

But like threads that had always been there—
just far enough apart that I had never thought to connect them.

• A seed breaking open beneath the soil
• A story of life returning after death
• A season where light begins to outlast the dark
• Moments in my own life where something I thought had ended… didn’t

They weren’t the same.
They didn’t come from the same place.

And yet, they were carrying something unmistakably familiar.

Not identical meaning—but the same movement.

Break.
Wait.
Return.

And then a quieter question began to form.

Not about what I was feeling…
but about how I was able to feel it at all.

Because none of these threads were new.

The seed had always broken open this way.
The seasons had always turned.
The stories had been told long before I ever heard them.

And still…

here they were, meeting me now—
not as information, but as something I could recognize.

Something I could almost… trust.

Which made me wonder:

How does something travel this far across time
and still arrive intact enough to be felt?

It couldn’t have been accidental.

Not this consistent.
Not this coherent.

Somehow, what began as scattered moments—
a change in weather, a story of return, a way of marking time—
had been gathered, held, and passed on.

Not perfectly.
Not without distortion.

But with enough care that the pattern remained.

Enough that someone like me, in a completely different life,
could still step into it…
and feel something real.

I don’t think I would have called that stewardship before.

It felt too structured.
Too intentional.

But this… this felt different.

Not like something managed.
But something carried.

Carried through ritual.
Through story.
Through seasons that return whether we notice them or not.

Carried in a way that didn’t just preserve the past—
but kept it available.

And that’s when the realization stopped being abstract.

Because if this was carried…
then what I was feeling wasn’t just renewal.

It was inheritance.

Something that had been kept alive—
long enough for me to find it.

Or maybe more honestly…
long enough for it to find me.

And I’m still sitting with that.
Because I don’t fully know what to do with something like that yet.

To realize that what I’m feeling—
what feels so personal, so immediate—
was held long before me…

that it was carried with enough care to still reach me now…
it changes the weight of it.

It’s no longer just mine to experience.
It’s something I’ve been trusted with.

And that trust feels different than responsibility.

Not like something I have to manage…
but something I have to be honest about.

Because not everything that is passed on is meant to be preserved.

Some things are carried forward because they serve life.
Others… because we’ve forgotten to question them.

I’ve started to see the difference.

Leadership can serve a cause.
It can organize, protect, sustain.

But stewardship asks something deeper—

whether what we’re serving still serves the human within it.

Because over time, the systems we build to protect what is human
can begin to ask for our loyalty…
instead of offering their protection.

And somewhere in that shift,
what was meant to be carried…
quietly begins to carry us.

What was meant to be carried… quietly begins to carry us.

And that trust doesn’t come with clarity.

It comes with a kind of quiet tension.

Not pressure to explain it.
Not urgency to turn it into something useful.

Just a question that lingers underneath it all:

What does it mean to receive something
that was never meant to stop with you?

I don’t think the answer is to hold it tightly.
Or to try to preserve it exactly as it was given.

Because whatever carried this forward before me
didn’t do it by freezing it in place.

It stayed alive.

It adapted.
It moved through different stories, different symbols, different lives.

And still, the pattern remained.

I used to run relay races.

I was never the fastest—but I understood my part.
Where to stand. When to move. How to receive without breaking stride.

How to pass it on.

And maybe that’s what this is.

Not something I have to create…
but something I’ve been handed.

Already in motion.
Already carrying more than I can see.

And all I have to do…

is not drop it.

Why remember the passing?

Because if we forget—
if we stop—

the race doesn’t pause.

It ends.

It was never just a race.

It was always
the human race.