By Dina Aldabbagh

I think God will grow you up by pulling your heart strings in certain directions. As such, I think it’s really important to trust our desires, because whether or not that desire itself is the thing that will stay in our lives, it will guide us in the direction that we need to go. Sometimes you cannot understand why you want something, but for whatever reason, you feel pulled to this thing. I think that is an urge that needs to be trusted.

There are these random times of life where you don’t know why you suddenly have this desire, where you suddenly feel less interested in something and more interested in doing something else. Well, you may have some resistance to it, because you’re not used to it, and yet still there’s just this little voice in you that tells you that you want something else. I think that’s important. I think that’s God’s guidance.

At the end of the day, you can’t really know how something is going to affect your life until you go down that road. One day, out of nowhere, I decided I wanted to be fluent in Spanish. While I had said before that I “wanted it,” I had not felt any urge to actually pursue it. Suddenly, though, I did feel that urge. Suddenly, naturally — although it did require conscious effort — I began studying every single day. Well, just six months after deciding I wanted to be fluent in Spanish, I also decided that I was going to move to Madrid, Spain.

Then, nine months after that, I did move to Spain. Well, now I have moved to Spain, lived in Spain, and moved back to the US, and I can tell you that for sure that was the single best decision I’ve ever made. As in: if I had to pinpoint one single decision of my life that I would guard closest to my heart and never take back, it would be moving to Spain.

While I did assume that moving there would be a great experience, I couldn’t have possibly guessed how it would change me. By that point, I thought I was already pretty much a developed product, more or less. I was 23 years old, and while I knew that of course more growth would happen over the course of my lifetime, I essentially thought that my core being as a person was pretty set. I thought the mold of who I was going to be had pretty much taken shape.

And then, I lived in Spain. And at first, it was completely not what I expected — in some ways — but totally what I needed. And it actually changed me in ways that I could’ve never predicted. In many ways. I had thought I’d already matured to a certain point before going, but I didn’t really realize how much left was in the tank. Writing this as a 25-year-old, I’m sure I still don’t. But that’s the point.

That’s the point of why when you want something, you kind of just have to trust it. The day I decided I wanted to be fluent in Spanish, I really could not have guessed why. I really could not have guessed why speaking Spanish would be so important to me until my desire to be fluent was strong enough that I wanted to live in another country that spoke that language.

And while speaking Spanish itself has shaped me and my life in a great number of ways, living in Spain itself did too. And again I say to you, there’s no way I could have guessed how my life would turn out from moving to Spain. I didn’t have the thought in my mind that this was the route that I would go down — and such is the point.

When you feel those moments of being pulled towards something, that’s just your little nudge. It’s not gonna force you there. It’s not gonna force you to do whatever that thing is telling you to do, but it’s just a little direction. It’s just telling you a step. And if you’re willing enough to follow it, it will take you where you need to go in this lifetime.

You just have to trust it. You just have to be willing enough to say that it’s okay if your life is changing — that it’s okay if you’re changing. 

There are these times in life that we feel a calm and non-forceful urge to show up in the world quietly, yet radically differently. It is a sort of movement that no one else in the world will notice, yet it changes your entire internal experience. These are formative times.

Well, in the moment, you can never see why showing up in that way is important for your future, it just is important. Even if you do not believe in God at all, it’s also logical to realize that you as a person may just be changing, and that the person who you are changing into has desires that are more aligned with your future than with your past. As such, that is the direction you need to go in, even if it’s new to you.

Those desires are your compass. They will not scream at you, but they will also not leave you alone. 

I remember during my time living in Spain, when I had applied to grad school and had finally realized that I was likely going to be leaving and my time in Spain would actually be a temporary period for now in my life, I suddenly had this urge to be much more present.

Typically during my walks to the metro in the morning for my daily commute, I would be scrolling on TikTok or listening to music. Suddenly, I had the urge to walk in silence. I just said to myself one day that I wanted to remember my morning walks to the metro.

“I want to remember this. I want to be where I’m at.” I said, so I began walking in silence every morning. Then I began staying in a little more silence during those metro rides. Then I began walking in silence from the metro to my work every day. Through doing this, more and more I noticed with higher contrast those moments in which I was going to scroll on my phone when I actually didn’t even want to. I started to notice my own compulsions around not being present.

Though it took a little bit of conscious effort to fight against my urges to scroll and not be present, little by little, it became more natural for me. Well, I couldn’t guess at the time how being more present in the “boring” moments of my life would actually help me relieve this pressure that I silently expected every single moment to be exciting.

I think many of us do this, actually. I think we often have such a high expectation for every single moment of life that when we inevitably meet those “boring” moments, we are actually dissatisfied. And through being more present in my life, I learned to accept the innate dissatisfaction that at times came from the quietness. When the space is not always filled, you slowly learn that the silence is not unsafe for you.

I’d begun appreciating certain things I hadn’t before. My thoughts began to slow down. I started accepting things in a different way than I had ever previously done. Without realizing it, the urge to be present freed me. It gave me more perspective on life, and one I believe is crucial. In order to have a happy life, I think you have to accept the fact that reality has these moments that aren’t always glamorous and shining. Acceptance — while it can look maybe a little defeated from the outside — actually frees a person from this pressure that everything needs to be perfect and great or else it’s worthless.

This lesson, and more, that came from being more present in my life was something that I could’ve never guessed I would experience when I first started having that urge to put down my phone during my walks to the metro in the morning. But I started trusting that, and just allowed the urge to be there. And in a radically quiet way, it changed my life.

You never know what something is going to do to you until it’s done. Don’t be scared by that. You can actually be hopeful in all those little moments in life when you feel a little change happening within you, because that means your life is going in a slightly different direction. That means there will be newness. That means they’ll be a new version of you, too. And as such, new life circumstances.

Everything is always just born from us. Nothing in our lives can come from what we are not. Therefore, if you are changing, let yourself change. Maybe your life is just meant to go in a slightly different direction.