The Forest Doesn't Know About Your Next Chapter

Original article created on Substack 4.04.2026

El Yunque, Puerto Rico. And why I stood still.

We arrived late.

That’s how it started. Late to El Yunque, the only tropical rainforest in the US National Forest system, the only one in all of North America, and already there were hundreds of people on the trail ahead of us. All of them moving fast. All of them heading toward the waterfall. Toward the swimming hole under the waterfall. Toward the thing they came to see.

 
I almost did the same.

There’s a particular kind of anxiety that lives in transitions. I know it well right now. A new job on the horizon. A new chapter. The kind of change that makes you feel like you should be moving, deciding, preparing. Like standing still is the same as falling behind.

But something stopped me on that trail.

I don’t know if it was the light coming through the canopy. Or the sound of the forest that is loud in a way that isn’t noise. Or maybe it was just the sheer scale of it. Trees that have been growing for longer than I’ve been anxious about anything.

I stopped.

I looked up.

And for a moment, I wasn’t someone with a next chapter. I was just a visitor. A small one.

Everything stopped.

Not metaphorically. Actually stopped. The anxiety. The mental tabs I had open. The running list of things to figure out before the new phase starts. The noise that lives in my head when I’m in a transition. All of it just... went quiet.

What took its place was peace. Real peace. The kind that settles into your body, not just your mind. I felt it in my chest. In my shoulders. In the way I was breathing without thinking about breathing.

I was in the right place. At the right time. On the right timeline. Mine. Not ahead of it, not behind it. Exactly where I was supposed to be.

I don’t say that lightly. I’m not someone who uses words like that easily. But that’s what I felt. A deep, bodily knowing that everything was in its right order. That I didn’t need to rush toward anything to prove that.

Our nervous systems are not designed for the pace we ask of them. Constant decisions. Constant stimulation. Constant becoming. We don’t give them permission to reset. And then we wonder why we feel depleted even when things are going well.

That forest reset me. In twenty minutes on a trail, it did what months of pushing forward couldn’t.

There is something humbling about standing in a place that doesn’t need you. That was here before you. That will be here after. El Yunque has survived hurricanes, including Maria, which devastated it in 2017. It came back. Not the same, never the same, but alive. Green. Dense. Completely itself.

I put my hand on a tree.

I don’t know why we do that. Touch old things. Maybe to feel that something has held on. Maybe to borrow a little of whatever it knows.

This tree didn’t know about my transition. About the new path. About the version of myself I’m still becoming. It just stood there, massive, unhurried, covered in moss and vines and the evidence of surviving everything that had come its way.

I stood there too. For longer than made sense if you had somewhere to be.

Here is what I know about transitions: they make you future-tense. Everything becomes about what’s next, what’s possible, what’s required. Your attention collapses into a narrow corridor pointed at the horizon.

But you can’t lead from there. Not really.

The best leaders I’ve seen, the ones who actually move organizations through change, aren’t the ones running fastest toward the waterfall. They’re the ones who pause. Who look up. Who let the moment ask something of them before they impose their agenda on it.

That pause isn’t passivity. It’s the opposite.

It’s presence. And presence is where everything actually begins.

I walked out of El Yunque sweaty and a little muddy and deeply, unexpectedly settled. Not because anything had changed. The new job search was still there. The uncertainty was still there. My list of things to do was exactly as long.

But I had remembered something. That I am not just a professional navigating a transition. I am a woman. A human. A visitor on this earth who gets to touch ancient trees in a rainforest in Puerto Rico and feel small in the best possible way.

That’s not a distraction from the work. That’s what makes the work worth doing.

 
At Anthilles Consulting, we work with leaders navigating exactly these moments — the transitions that ask you to be both decisive and grounded. If that resonates, I’d love to hear from you.