Isn’t it amazing — and shocking and scary and uncertain — how much has changed in just a week? I’ve been thinking of Martha Beck‘s writing, especially of her idea of the cycle of change. I’ve been going through this cycle myself the past eight or nine months, and now, suddenly the whole world is changing at incredible speed.

At Square One, everything disintegrates. Beck uses the image of a caterpillar in a cocoon, who at the very beginning of change literally dissolves into goo. We lose the structures we’ve built, things crumble, it’s clear everything is changing, and we have no idea what’s going to happen. Even when the change is welcome, earth-shaking change can disrupt the ground we stand on. In fact, here’s Martha’s Square One mantra:

I don’t know what the hell is going on, and that’s OK.

Martha Beck, Finding Your Own North Star

Some other choice phrases you might utter in Square One include:

“Oh, no!”

“Oh, %*&#!”

“Where am I? What’s happening?”

“I can’t be here! This can’t be happening!”

“What did I just do?”

“What am I doing?”

“What am I going to do?”

“Ghaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!“

Sound familiar? Our collective change right now includes people dying, includes tragic uncertainty, and I don’t mean to make light of it. (Sometimes humor helps, though!) But I think right now, if we listen closely, we might hear a collective global shouting of these phrases, especially from the United States, where let’s face it, we’re not very practiced in dealing with real uncertainty.

A few months ago, almost as if anticipating this massive societal change, my inner guidance led me to that caterpillar-dissolving-into-goo stage. I sold or gave away almost everything I owned, have no job and very little money left in my bank account, no home but generous friends who have taken me in here in Costa Rica. For months, I convinced myself I was “traveling,” and that I’d eventually get a job, car, apartment, etc. But then, around the end of December, I relented. I let myself start dissolving, really giving into the uncertainty, the unformed months and years ahead. Instead of this being a temporary space between structured periods where I have “everything together,” I let the wide, dark, uncertainty stretch in front of me.

How did I do it? I sat every day for 20 minutes, then 20 minutes, then 20 minutes (for an hour total) with coffee in the morning and embraced it, let myself dissolve and be uncertain. Slowly, things have emerged out of that space, things I’m excited about and that feel useful to a world going through such similarly uncertain change.

Other advice from Martha Beck that has led me through: “Instead of clinging, read your internal compass … Make small moves … Stay present … reframe your identity loss … repeat the Square One Mantra … be a kindergartener (the last time many of us actually let ourselves not know, be “new” at it) … explore the magic of the ‘threshold.'” (I really recommend her book(s) if you’d like to read more in depth!)

This loss of ‘normalcy,’ this feeling of the uncertainty at Square One is hard. It’s a time of anger, fear, denial, clinging to old things that worked — a daily, minute-by-minute rollercoaster of ups and downs. From my personal experience, I can say the way to get through it — instead of resisting change and shattering — is to let yourself melt down, become “goo,” to grieve and to relent into the current of change.

The more I sit with this, the more I feel so certain about Martha’s last point, about the magic of the threshold, the magic of liminal periods when anything can happen. Because as so much crumbles and shatters around us, so much is already new, at a pace I could never have anticipated. The skies over factories have cleared, streets clogged with traffic are open, people are at home with family baking and playing and appreciating the smallest flickers of sun, companies are hiring 50,000 or 100,000 workers with benefits and sick leave.

My heart aches for the lives lost, trembles in fear for what could happen to me, my family, my friends, to more people on this planet. It fears for leaders or governments or corporations that might take advantage of people at their most uncertain. And yet, there are small glimmers of new, of magic, of flittering wings, particularly from small, grassroots, small-group efforts. For all the suffering, it’s critical for those who are privileged enough to have their lives broken open right now (who haven’t already had everything broken open living as a climate refugee or in limbo on the border, etc.) to break, to melt down, to learn from others, to join what everyone on this planet is going through — and to help the magic swell.