Two days after Christmas, I walked into a store and saw Easter Cadbury Eggs already on the shelves. Not a single mattress sale for Presidents’ Day in sight. Just a clean leap from tinsel to tulips, as if the world had quietly decided to skip the expected steps and sprint ahead. It struck me because that is exactly what my life feels like right now. For decades, I lived inside the predictable rhythms of clinical practice, the seasons of medicine, the cycles of systems, the familiar rituals of care. But stepping into advocacy has felt more like walking into a store in late December and finding spring waiting for me. No transition. No warning. No “mattress sale” buffer zone. Just acceleration.

And with acceleration comes reflection. I have found myself thinking about Andy Dufresne crawling through filth toward freedom, Booker T. Washington reminding us that no one can hold another person down without staying down there too, and Psalm 23 whispering that stumbling is not failure but formation, that sometimes God lets us fall to see if we will rise, and carries us when we cannot. These are not random quotes. They are the scaffolding of a journey I did not expect to take, one that feels less like reinvention and more like revelation. A calling, perhaps, though I still hesitate to use that word. Yet the signs keep appearing: unexpected collaborations, invitations from people I once admired from afar, dreams that place me in rooms I have not yet entered, and a growing sense that the work ahead is bigger than the work behind. I am not sure where this path leads. But I know this: When Easter candy shows up in December, you pay attention. Something is shifting. Something is moving faster than the calendar. And sometimes the only faithful response is to follow.

I have always been someone who planned before moving. Medicine trains you that way, assess, anticipate, prepare, execute. But lately my instincts have been outrunning my planning, pulling me forward faster than my mind can map the terrain. It is disorienting, like stepping into a desert without a compass. I keep thinking about T.E. Lawrence crossing the Sinai with nothing but direction and conviction. No map. No guarantee. Just the knowledge that if he kept moving west, he would eventually reach the canal with news that would change the course of a war. He did not know the route. He knew the mission. That is where I find myself: walking toward something I cannot fully name yet, guided by impulses that feel both unsettling and unmistakably right. I do not have coordinates. I have momentum. And in moments like this, I wonder whether I am supposed to be looking for a burning bush, some unmistakable sign that I am on the right path. But the truth is, burning bushes rarely appear as miracles. They appear as alignment. As convergence. As the quiet sense that your life is suddenly larger than your plans. For me, the “bush” looks like unexpected collaborators reaching out, dreams that feel symbolic rather than random, articles accepted during supposed vacations, and a growing sense that dignity is not just a value but a vocation. These are not supernatural signs. They are the modern equivalent of fire in the desert: something that catches your attention and refuses to let you walk away unchanged. I am not pretending to have clarity. I am acknowledging the disorientation, and trusting that the direction is true even when the map is not.

The coalition as compass

As I have walked through this season of disorientation, something unexpected has begun to take shape, not a map, not a plan, but a purpose. A direction that does not come from strategy sessions or five-year projections, but from the quiet, steady pull of dignity itself. The Coalition for Dignity in Neurodevelopmental Care did not begin as a grand design. It began as a response to suffering, to injustice, to the quiet erosion of humanity that happens when systems forget the people they were built to serve. I did not set out to build a movement. I set out to tell the truth. But sometimes truth has a way of gathering others to it, the way a fire draws people in from the cold. And that is when I realized: The coalition is not just an organization. It is my compass.

Not because it gives me certainty, but because it gives me orientation. It points toward the people who have been pushed into the ditch Booker T. Washington warned us about. It points toward the families who have been crawling through their own versions of Andy Dufresne’s tunnel, searching for daylight. It points toward the valleys of Psalm 23, where stumbling is not a failure but a test of whether we still believe in the possibility of being carried. Every conversation, every unexpected collaborator, every message from someone like Elizabeth Torres, these are not random encounters. They are the landmarks of a path I did not know I was walking until I looked back and saw the line they formed. And the more I listen, the more I sense that this work is not simply something I am choosing. It is something that is choosing me. That is the part that feels like calling, not a voice from a burning bush, but the unmistakable convergence of instinct, experience, grief, and moral clarity. A sense that the decades I spent in exam rooms and hospital corridors were preparation for something larger, something that requires not just clinical skill but testimony, not just knowledge but courage. I do not pretend to know where this leads. I only know that the direction is true. And sometimes that is enough to keep walking, to keep writing, to keep speaking, to keep trusting that the canal will appear when it needs to, and that the news I carry will matter when it arrives.

News worth carrying

I do not know what waits on the other side of this desert. I do not know which rooms I will be invited into, which voices will join mine, or which systems will resist the message I carry. But I do know this: The news is worth carrying. That dignity belongs at the center of neurodevelopmental care. That testimony can reshape systems. That grief can become fuel. That disorientation is not the end of clarity; it is the beginning. I have spent a lifetime preparing without knowing what I was preparing for. Now, as I step into this new terrain, part Sinai, part Washington hotel, part burning bush, I am learning to trust the direction even when the map is missing. And maybe that is the real lesson of the Cadbury Eggs in December: Sometimes the world moves faster than we expect. Sometimes spring arrives before we are ready. Sometimes the calling comes before the compass. So I will keep walking. Keep writing. Keep speaking. Keep listening. Because somewhere ahead, there is a canal. And when I reach it, I will have news to deliver.

Ronald L. Lindsay is a developmental-behavioral pediatrician.