What does it mean to have grace? It can be described has a state of favor or goodwill. Personally, I think of grace as a quality of being. It informs the way you relate to yourself and others.

When you have grace, you treat every thing, every situation, with the care, respect and attention demanded of them, and understand those demands completely.

It’s easy to have grace when things are going according to plan. When expected events produce the expected outcomes, a state of grace becomes the default. The known provides fertile ground on which grace can thrive.

By contrast, the unknown is chaos. It casts a shadow over a person and makes them susceptible to stress and irritation. Uncertainty makes us defensive, being defensive makes us wary, turns us inward not in grace but in some more primal form of self-preservation that acts in spite of the other or even of the self, trading long-term decisions for short-term ones.

Keeping grace under uncertain conditions is a skill. Much like patience, it requires first and foremost an awareness of things as they are, not as they seem. Seeing through the clouds, or even not seeing them but still knowing the Sum shines on the other side.

Plans are valuable, but they come with a huge caveat: they can, and almost certainly will fail. Therefore, failure should be built into any plan. Not as a million fallbacks, but simply as the freedom to adapt to changing circumstances, to the unexpected. Once you truly accept the unexpected, you can begin to act with grace in any situation.

This is easier said than done. Myself, I rely heavily on routine. My childhood was tumultuous to say the least, and it make me extremely rigid—and, in turn, brittle, prone to crack under any sort of pressure. Even after years of therapy and breakthroughs, the unexpected still hits me hard, too hard for comfort.

Related Notes or Links

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• My sleep routine
• Self-care is non-negotiable