My husband looked at me one morning last month and said, “You seem like yourself again.”
I had to think about that for a second, because I hadn’t noticed the shift until he brought it to my attention. Somewhere over the previous few weeks, the bracing had eased. I was still watching and adapting, still aware of all the things that had changed since his new diagnosis. But I wasn’t white-knuckling my way through the day anymore. The house felt less like a problem I was managing and more like home again.
That’s the closest I can get to describing Still Water from the inside.
It doesn’t announce itself. There’s no morning when you wake up and think, I’ve arrived. It’s more like one day someone you trust tells you that you seem like yourself, and you realize they’re right, and you feel something loosen a little at the thought.
What Another Drop Taught Me About This One
There was a morning not long ago when I stood in our kitchen and noticed the green oxygen tubing running from the bedroom into the living room. My husband was still sleeping. The house was quiet. And something about seeing that tubing made the weight of what had changed land differently than it had before.
We’ve been on a caregiving road for a while, he and I. New diagnoses layered on older ones, new equipment, new routines built around a body that keeps asking us to adapt.
I know the Ripple Journey from the inside, not just because I keep living it, but because living it is what gave it a name. This latest Drop set the waves in motion again. There was the internal reckoning, the honest conversations we needed to have, and then the slow reaching out to friends who could sit with me in it without rushing me toward a brighter interpretation.
And then, slowly, the settling.
What I know about transition is that it moves in waves. The Drop hits, the water is disturbed, and what follows isn’t tidy or sequential. And then, eventually, there’s a quieter kind of steadiness on the other side. Urgency softens. The hard thing is still present, but it’s no longer running the whole show.
That settling — not resolution, just the return of breath — is what I’ve been calling Still Water for years. Writing about it as part of a framework is one thing. Living through another Drop and finding my way back to Still Water is another thing entirely.
What I Got Wrong About Still Water When I First Named It
The Ripple Journey didn’t start as a framework. It started as the pattern I kept noticing in my own transitions — and the name came later. When I first described Still Water, I think I imagined it as a destination. The place you get to after all the hard work. And there’s something true in that because it does come after. But calling it a destination implied it would stay, and that’s not quite right.
Still Water is more like a state you return to. Or maybe: a state you practice returning to. Because the waves don’t stop, new ones come. And I’ve had enough Drops by now — professional, relational, health-related, the particular accumulation of things that life hands you after 50 — to understand that what shifts isn’t the disruption. What shifts is the trust that you can find your way back through the waves.
That trust is hard to explain to someone who hasn’t lived through enough transitions to have earned it. That’s not optimism, exactly. It’s closer to evidence. You’ve come through things before, and you know it now in your body, not just in your head.
The Green Tubing Is Still There
I want to be clear about something, because I don’t want this to read as a tidy ending.
The situation hasn’t resolved. My husband’s health is what it is. The equipment is now part of our home, our routine, and the texture of a day. Some mornings are heavier than others. The grief that lives at the edge of a long caregiving relationship doesn’t disappear because you’ve found your footing again.
What changed is something smaller and more real than resolution. I stopped fighting the weight of it. At some point, I just let it be what it is. It’s hard, and it’s ours, and also full of the ordinary things we love about our life together. His humor came back first. That helped more than I can say.
There’s something about letting yourself stop performing okayness that gives actual okayness room to return. I don’t know how to say that without it sounding more prescriptive than I mean it. I just know that when I stopped trying to carry it gracefully and started carrying it honestly, something shifted.
For Wherever You Are In This
If you’re reading this in the middle of your own long transition — a job that ended, a role that changed, a future that looks different from what you expected — I’m not going to tell you that Still Water is waiting on the other side if you just do the right things. That’s not how it works, and you probably already know that.
What I will say is that the water does calm. And sometimes the first sign is someone who knows you well saying, "You seem like yourself again." Or noticing that you laughed at something without it costing you anything. Or realizing that you made a decision this week without rehearsing all the ways it could go wrong.
Small signs. Easy to miss.
Worth paying attention to.
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María Tomás-Keegan is the co-founder of Betweenward™, a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for women moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps women reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for work and life transformation. She writes from the steady practice of learning to live honestly again amid what has changed.
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