Yes

There’s a peculiar way we humans make our bargains.

We light candles in the dim hours, or close our eyes under the quilt, or murmur into the air like we’re leaving a message on the world’s oldest answering machine. We ask for things—earnestly, relentlessly—change, love, a door into some kinder version of our lives. We imagine it arriving the way we’ve been taught good things come: clean, certain, and in a package that looks exactly like we ordered. But it hardly ever does.

More often, it shows up with frayed edges, leaning sideways, dressed in the wrong colors. It comes in the form of a job you’ve never done before, a move you didn’t plan, a stranger who makes your heart pound but whose story has pages missing. It comes uninvited to your doorstep and knocks like it means business.

And that’s when the bargaining shifts. If only there were a guarantee, we think—some written promise in gold ink that this leap would land us on solid ground, that the work would be worth it, that love would not dissolve, that the new life would not betray us. If the universe would just send the paperwork, notarized, we’d sign it right now. But there are no such guarantees. There never were.

I learned this once before.

Years ago, my house was a sinking ship—walls still standing but tilting under the weight of bills, foreclosure pressing in like high tide. I prayed daily, hunched in my own desperation, asking for rescue. And then one day, in the stillness after a long exhale, came a thought that seemed ridiculous: Open a yoga studio. An ashram.

I wanted to shove it aside.

How could I dream up something new when my present was on fire? I had no business experience. No cushion to fall back on. And everybody I told just shook their heads like I’d lost my mind. But that idea stood there, waiting.

And somehow—half trembling, half stubborn—I said yes. The road that followed was anything but smooth. There were months I thought the whole thing would collapse, days I wished I’d chosen something easier. But in time, it grew into a life so rich and surprising that now I can’t imagine the other life—the one where I said no, stayed put, and watched the years fold in on themselves.

And now, here I am again.

This time the ground under me feels steadier. I’m not fighting for air. Yet when a new opportunity came—a messy, glorious thing with no guarantees—my first instinct was to recoil. Why can’t I just slide by? I asked myself. Why can’t change be clean, safe, and certain?

But then I picture the alternative: years passing with nothing different, the days predictable as the view out the same kitchen window. I imagine my prayers echoing back at me, unanswered not because the world wasn’t listening, but because I wasn’t. And I wonder—how could I ever dare to ask again, knowing I’d once turned away?

I think of the woman I’ve always believed I’ll be—ninety-one years old, her life a quilt of love and work and wild leaps, surrounded by the people she’s cherished. I see her lying in bed, her face soft with peace. I ask her, as I always do, How did you get here? What did you do when the door opened and you were afraid to step through?

She smiles like it’s the simplest thing in the world.

And she says,

I said yes.

Hari Om Tat Sat