What do you do when you feel lost and uncertain?

What do you do when the expectations around you don’t seem to match up with what you’re feeling inside?

What do you do when it turns out what you thought you wanted isn’t so desirable in practice?

What do you do when it just isn’t working?

You begin again.

I don’t mean that in a cool Aaliyah-style “Dust yourself off and try again” sort of way (okay, at least not entirely).

I mean it in a Founding Fathers, Boston Tea Party sort of way.

The American colonists moved here for opportunities they thought would work out well for them — business ventures, religious freedoms, a fresh start. They knew they had to live by King George’s rules, and he could be a difficult boss, but, all in all things were fine.

Except they gradually became less fine. And then even less fine. And eventually intolerable.

So, what did the people do?

They forged a new path.

Yes, they threw the tea in the harbor, and I have fabulous earrings that say spilling the tea since 1773 to enjoy commemorating that (I’m from Massachusetts, bear with me). However, before they threw the tea, before they met to write what became the Declaration of Independence, before they fought for freedom from the king’s tyranny…

They paused. (I don’t know how long they paused, I wasn’t there, but, I’m quite sure they paused, even briefly.) They paused to consider at what point enough would be enough, and what it would mean if they hit that point. They paused with enough time to figure out that life couldn’t go on the way it was anymore, and it was time for change. Yes, they had to enact that change, and it was unprecedented, and surely terrifying. But before they acted, they stopped and thought about it. They stopped, and thought, and decided that it was worth the pain and sacrifice to begin again and fight for a new dream, a new reality.

I take inspiration from their courage to begin again, in these difficult times for me personally, for us as a nation, and for the world at large. For better or worse, you see, we are all in this together. And we have seen for quite some time now that things are not working as we thought they would, as we expected they should. So, it is time today to pause, reflect, remember the ideals that our country’s founders were fighting for, the ones we can still fight for.

Tomorrow (or perhaps Monday), we begin again.