Take the balcony back

You have been walking past it for weeks now. The balcony, the back step, the corner of the yard, whatever your spot was. You do not go out there anymore, and you tell yourself that is discipline. Look at it a little more honestly. You are avoiding a piece of your own home because a habit still holds the deed to it. The place has the shape of the ritual pressed into it, so you leave it alone, and every single time you leave it alone you confirm that it belongs to something other than you.

That is not freedom. That is a room you gave away. Avoidance works for a while, and early on it is genuinely the right call, but it has a ceiling. The link stays intact underneath, waiting, and one evening you will end up out there anyway, unprepared, at the worst possible hour of the worst possible day. The alternative is to go out there on purpose, while you are steady, for a reason that has nothing to do with the old one. You want the place overwritten, not guarded.

So go out with a coffee and stay ten minutes. Go out to take a phone call and pace around the way people do on phone calls. Go out into the morning air before anything has happened yet, hands full, with somewhere to be afterwards. The link fires when you step out, finds you doing something else entirely, and updates itself. Then it fires a little quieter the next time. That is the whole mechanism, and it only runs while you are actually standing there. You cannot rewire a place from the other side of the door.

Pick your moment rather than waiting for one to arrive. Steady day, daylight, something in your hand, ten minutes on the clock. Ask God to come out there with you, which is not a strange request at all, it is close to the point of this. After a few weeks the balcony is just a balcony again, a good place to stand in the evening, part of the house you pay for every month. Take it back. It was always yours.