A difficult season can take your comfort without taking your direction.

A hard stretch can take away almost everything about how your life felt: the routines, the security, the ease of ordinary days. What it does not automatically take is where you were headed, unless you hand that over as well. Direction is one of the few things that survives a loss of comfort, and it survives quietly, without needing anything to be going well. It can sit dormant for a long time and still be intact.

If things have been stripped back, check whether your direction is genuinely gone or only currently impossible. Those are very different situations. Keep the smallest possible contact with where you were going, even one hour a week, so that it is still there when conditions allow.