How to Stay Steady in a Season of Sadness
Small ways your values hold you in place when your energy is low.
Some mornings look like this.
How to Stay Steady in a Season of Sadness
Small ways your values hold you in place when your energy is low.
Lately, the emotion I notice most often is sadness.
Not crisis-level sadness, and not the kind that stops life entirely—but a quieter sadness that settles in during seasons of change, when the life you knew has shifted and the new shape of things is still forming.
This kind of sadness doesn’t demand fixing or explanation. It asks to be acknowledged. It is the sadness that comes when life has changed, and you are still living it well, just more quietly than before.
Sadness changes the texture of the day. Mornings can feel heavier. Decisions take longer. Even good moments arrive more softly.
You can be productive, responsible, and outwardly “fine”—and still feel the undercurrent of something tender moving beneath it all. None of this means you are failing. It means you are adjusting.
Many people assume that values are easiest to live when we feel strong, clear, and certain. In reality, our values matter most during the seasons when energy is lower, motivation is uneven, and simply showing up requires more intention than it once did.
In these quieter seasons, values stop being aspirational ideas and become stabilizers. They don’t pull us forward dramatically; they hold us in place long enough for meaning to re-form.
Sadness lowers the volume of life. For those who have spent years being capable, dependable, and strong for others, it often arrives not as collapse, but as a softening. A slowing. A reduction in outward intensity.
And yet, life continues.
Living our values in these seasons rarely looks dramatic. It looks like continuing to care for the responsibilities in front of us—keeping a small promise, offering patience when we would rather withdraw, taking one steady step forward even when standing still would feel easier.
I have noticed that keeping one small promise each day—finishing a paragraph, making a call, taking a walk—restores a quiet sense of agency.
Maintaining one stabilizing routine gives the day shape. Offering one small act of kindness, even when no one notices, reminds me that sadness does not erase character.
When many parts of life feel unsettled, I try to keep one or two emotional anchors steady—routines, relationships, places, or small daily rituals that remain untouched while everything else shifts.
For me, that looks like praying in the morning before the day begins, drinking coffee while overlooking water, taking Percy for his daily sniff walk, and reaching out to a family member each day.
These anchors are simple but steady. They give shape to the day when the larger story still feels undefined.
Those anchors allow the rest of the adjustment to happen without overwhelming us.
What I am learning is that becoming steady again does not happen all at once. It happens in small returns—returning to the work that still matters, returning to the people who remain, returning to routines that anchor the day.
Over time, these small returns quietly rebuild direction. Not because the sadness disappears, but because meaning begins to grow alongside it.
As I have spent time identifying the sources of meaning that energize my life rather than drain it, I notice that the life I am building reflects what I actually need.
I am writing.
I am near big water and forest.
I am experiencing family closeness.
I am happy spending time with Percy, my Papillon puppy.
I am testing seasonal rhythms.
I am refining my purpose rather than chasing it.
In the midst of sadness, I am learning to live beautifully, to influence quietly, to stay close to nature, to stay close to truth, and to stay close to the people who matter.
I am not in a hurry to make any of this happen. But over the past year, I have quietly been assembling a life that holds meaning for the next chapter.
Sadness is still my overarching feeling. There is too much to mourn, including hundreds of planned chapters that will never come to pass. I do not expect the sadness to disappear entirely. Perhaps not ever.
But I am beginning to see that it is not only an ending. It is also the soil in which something new is taking root.
You don’t need to hurry yourself out of these seasons. Sadness does not mean you are stuck. It often means you are between chapters.
Strength in these seasons is rarely visible. It looks like continuing. And continuing, quietly and with care, is often how lives take their next true shape.
I’m grateful you’re here.
If you’re walking through a quieter season, I hope this piece reminds you that continuing—even gently—still counts.
This week, consider one small return: one routine, one promise, or one act of quiet steadiness that helps you feel anchored.
And if someone you care about is navigating sadness, feel free to share this with them. Sometimes knowing you’re not alone in the middle of it makes all the difference.