When the Light Has Begun,
But You Can’t Feel It Yet
A reflection on the day after the Solstice,
longing, and remembering you’re still in the game
Today is the day after the Winter Solstice.
Technically, the light has begun to return.
The days are now getting longer.
And yet… it’s still dark.
I’ve always found the Solstice to be a supportive marker in the year, not because everything suddenly feels better, but because it reminds me that movement is happening even when it’s imperceptible. Something has shifted, even if my body hasn’t caught up yet.
I’ll be honest. I’m someone who deeply prefers warmth and sun. I love summer. I love swimming. And in recent years, as I’ve gotten more into gardening, winter has felt even harder. The cold. The darkness. The waiting.
So this time of year often brings up something very human for me — and for many of the people I work with — which is the feeling of being here while wanting to be there.
We experience this all over our lives.
Wanting it to be summer when it’s winter.
Wanting to be in a relationship when you’re single.
Wanting more financial ease.
Wanting the world to look different than it does right now.
There are so many moments where life is exactly as it is… and we wish it were something else.
And when I sit with that tension — the wanting, the waiting, the sense of “not yet” — I often come back to an ancient story that helps me soften around it.
It’s a Hindu creation story that was later popularized by Alan Watts, and it speaks to the idea of Lila — Divine Play.
In this tradition, reality begins as Brahman: infinite, whole, undivided. Complete. But completeness doesn’t know itself without contrast. So Brahman expresses itself as many. It becomes the world. It becomes experience.
This expression is not described as a mistake or a fall — it’s described as play.
To make the game feel real, Brahman introduces Maya, the veil. Maya isn’t fake in the way we often think of illusion. It’s the forgetting of wholeness. Forgetting that we were always connected. Forgetting that we are still connected.
Through this forgetting, unity becomes separation. Eternity becomes time. The divine experiences itself as human.
But the key part of this story is that the separation is experiential, not total. We are never actually divided.
Awakening — moksha — isn’t escaping the world. It’s remembering who you are while still playing the game.
Alan Watts tells this as a kind of cosmic game of hide and seek.
He says, imagine you are God. Infinite. Eternal. All-powerful. At first, you dream wonderful dreams — full of pleasure, beauty, bliss. But eventually, you get bored. And you say, What if I dreamed I wasn’t God?
So you dream yourself as a human. Or an animal. Or a star.
At first, you keep it light. You remember you’re dreaming. But after a while, you want the game to feel more real. More exciting. So you decide to forget. Completely.
You forget who you are so the experience feels more intense. More poignant. Until you truly believe you’re separate, that you need to get somewhere else in order to be whole again.
And the game continues until you decide to wake up — not forever, but just enough to remember that you’re playing.
Because the dream is part of the fun.
This story always reminds me that the tension of here versus there is not a personal failure. It’s part of the design. The wanting is what makes the experience vivid.
Rumi echoes this in his poem The Door Is Open, where he asks:
Why are you sleeping?
Don’t you know the door is open?
Why pretend you’re locked out?
Why stay in prison when the door is so wide open?
He invites us to move outside the tangle of fearful thinking, to slow down, to live in widening rings of being.
So if you’re someone who struggles with winter…
Or with waiting…
Or with wanting life to be different than it is right now…
What if that longing isn’t proof that something is wrong?
What if it’s simply part of the game — the illusion that “there” is better than “here,” designed to make the experience more alive?
The light has begun to return.
Even if you can’t feel it yet.
And maybe today doesn’t ask you to rush forward or fix anything.
Maybe it simply asks you to enjoy the game a little more.
Listen to the Podcast Episode
This post is adapted from a bonus episode of the Resource Yourself Podcast, created as part of the Yuletide Renewal series.
🎧 You can listen to the full episode here:
https://therapytothrive.com/podcast
More Support
If you’re looking for additional grounding, reflection, and support — especially during seasons of waiting or transition — you can explore resources, offerings, and ongoing support at:
