Guided Reflections to Step Into Your Next Chapter
There are periods in life when it doesn’t make sense to rush.
Moments where something is clearly coming to an end, but hasn’t yet settled into a shape you can name.
Where the next chapter doesn’t lack ambition, but it lacks integration.
For me, one of those periods was the final months I spent living in Seattle.
I was in the process of leaving many things at once.
A job. My marriage had also ended.
And in general I was saying goodbye to a life that had taken nearly my entire adult life to build.
I knew I was moving back to Denmark.
What I didn’t know was who I would be when I arrived.
Creating structure when identity is dissolving
During that time, I did something very simple.
Every day, I walked around Green Lake.
It’s a lake you walk in a circle.
The same path. The same turns.
Often the same people, moving through the space at roughly the same time each day.
There was something deeply grounding in that repetition.
Something calming about knowing exactly where I was on the path without having to think.
I walked to move my body.
To get my blood circulating.
To let my thoughts wander without directing them.
After the walk, I would often sit at a café near the lake.
Order a café au lait. Sometimes two.
Occasionally a simple dish they made exceptionally well: black beans, avocado, sour cream.
And then I would write.
Writing without knowing what you’re looking for
I wasn’t writing to find answers. I was writing to get things out.
What had happened. What had fallen apart.
What no longer made sense.
And what was still pulling at me, even though I didn’t yet understand why.
I was privileged during that period.
I didn’t have a fixed job.
I was waiting to be able to travel, for practical reasons.
That gave me time.
And I used that time to write: again and again.
There is something particular about that process.
Inside your head, everything feels equally important.
Once it’s on the page, differences begin to appear.
Some things carry more weight.
Others repeat themselves.
And when you get them out, they all start to lose their grip.
There is both chaos and cosmos in it.
But simply being able to see your thoughts in front of you already creates a different kind of calm.
Gathering experience into something coherent
Gradually, I began to be able to explain things to myself.
Not neatly. Not in conclusions. But in connections.
I wrote about what had happened.
How I had experienced it.
What it had done to me.
And slowly, it became clearer who I had become,
and who I was no longer.
The same thing happened in my work life.
I began building a portfolio site.
Not because it necessarily was needed to lead to a job.
But because I needed to gather my work into something I could understand myself.
I ended up with four cornerstones: themes I could stand on, return to, and offer.
In hindsight, the site probably didn’t matter at all for getting my next job, as I truly got lucky and benefitted from using my network in Denmark.
But it mattered enormously to me.
It allowed me to get clarity on, what something new could look like. In a meaningful way.
It organised something internal.
It gave language to what I could do.
And to what I no longer wanted to do.
When experiences begin to form patterns
What I was doing back then, I now recognise as a form of guided reflection: even though I didn’t call it that at the time.
I was collecting small fragments of experience:
conversations
situations
moments that had left an impression
And I began to see them as parts of one larger story.
Some experiences pointed clearly toward what felt right for me.
And others showed, just as clearly, what didn’t.
There were patterns in when I felt most alive.
And patterns in when I felt out of place.
This made it possible to distinguish between:
external input and expectations
and internal longings that had been waiting for attention
Are you ready to step into your next chapter?
This is where the question of the next chapter begins to make sense.
Not as a demand to know exactly what you should do.
But as an invitation to understand what has brought you here.
If you don’t know what has preceded this moment, what has shaped you, challenged you, exhausted you,
it becomes difficult to orient forward.
Reflection is not an exercise in optimizing the past. It’s a way of taking your own life seriously.
Of seeing experiences as breadcrumbs.
As pointers of identity.
And once they become visible, the next chapter feels less abstract.
A transition
For many people, the end of a year feels like a natural moment for this kind of reflection.
But transitions don’t follow calendars.
This kind of reflection can be used anytime something is completing.
A year, a specific job or type of work, a way of being in the world.
Not to force something new. But to create the inner clarity that allows the new to emerge.
When we understand what we’re carrying with us, it becomes easier to sense what we no longer need to bring along.
And very often, that’s where the next chapter begins.
