Turn Your Face Toward the Sky

July 27, 2026

Three quiet theories for finding your footing again — and one that takes sixty seconds.

Tobia Bradley, CDC  •  Certified Divorce Coach

There’s a particular kind of tired that comes with ending a marriage. It isn’t the tired that sleep fixes. It’s the tired of making decisions all day about a life you didn’t plan on rebuilding — the paperwork, the logistics, the conversations you rehearse in the shower and then never have.

If that’s where you are right now, I want to offer you something small. Not a five-step plan. Not a mindset overhaul. Just three ideas I keep coming back to, and one in particular that takes sixty seconds and asks almost nothing of you.

Start there.

Theory One

The Sixty-Second Sky

Here it is, in full: when your mood drops, go outside, close your eyes, and turn your face toward the sky for one minute.

That’s the whole thing. You don’t have to walk anywhere. You don’t have to change clothes or find your shoes. A back step, a balcony, a parking lot, the strip of grass outside the attorney’s office — all of it counts. Overcast counts too; even a gray sky carries far more light than the brightest room in your house.

Eyes closed, chin lifted, breathing slowly. Sixty seconds.

What’s actually happening

There’s real biology underneath this, which is part of why I love it. Natural light hitting your eyes — even through closed lids — reaches the small cluster of cells in your brain that runs your internal clock. That clock is what tells your body when to release cortisol and when to ease off.

Divorce tends to scramble that rhythm. You’re up at 3 a.m. with your mind racing and flattened at two in the afternoon. Light is one of the few honest signals your body still trusts, and it doesn’t require you to believe in it or feel hopeful about it. It just works, the way it has worked your entire life.

The slow breathing does its own quiet work. A long exhale is one of the few direct levers you have on your nervous system — it tells the part of you scanning for threat that nothing is chasing you in this particular minute.

What it feels like

Here is what I want you to pay attention to, because this is the part that matters more than the science.

Warmth arrives first on your eyelids and your cheekbones. Behind your closed eyes there’s a warm orange-red glow, the color of light coming through skin. There’s air moving somewhere. Birds carrying on a conversation that has nothing whatsoever to do with you or your case or your calendar.

And your shoulders come down half an inch without being asked.

Now here is the thing I most want you to notice: your body is responding to that sun exactly the way it always has. Not the way it did before. The same way. The warmth on your face feels the way it felt when you were nine years old lying in the grass.

The divorce did not reach every part of you.

It reached your finances and your calendar and your address and your family photos. It did not reach the part of you that knows how to feel good in the sun. That part was never on the table. It has been intact this whole time, waiting for you to have sixty free seconds.

That’s the fresh perspective. Not that everything will be fine — I won’t tell you that, and you wouldn’t believe me. Just that the damage has edges. Something in you is still whole, and you can go find proof of it before lunch.

Theory Two

The Borrowed Lens

People do not see you as you actually are. They see you through the lens of their own insecurities, their own fears, their own history — including the parts they’ve never looked at directly.

The relative with strong opinions about your timing. The friend who went quiet when you told her. The acquaintance who asked a question that landed like a slap. Almost none of that is about you. The woman who is frightened of her own marriage will have a great deal to say about yours.

What they’ve concluded about you is a report on where they are. It is not a verdict on who you are, and you are not required to accept it as evidence.

You are allowed to set down opinions you never agreed to carry.

Theory Three

The Long Way Around

The hearing that got continued. The house that fell through. The month where everything stalled and you felt yourself falling behind some invisible schedule.

I’m not going to tell you that everything happens for a reason. Some of what you’re going through is simply hard, and it doesn’t need to be redeemed to be survived.

But I’ve watched enough people move through this to notice how often the interruption turned out to matter — the day something fell through and you ended up in a conversation you needed, or the timeline that slipped and gave you six weeks you didn’t know you were desperate for.

You are allowed to stop treating every obstacle as evidence that you’ve fallen behind in a race no one else is running. You will get where you’re going. Some of it just takes the long way around.

Start small

If you take one thing from this, take the first one.

Tomorrow, sometime before noon, step outside. Close your eyes. Tip your chin up. Breathe slowly and count to sixty.

You’re not fixing anything. You’re just letting a very old part of you remember that it still knows how to feel good, for one minute, in the middle of a hard year.

That’s enough for today.

A gentle note: sixty seconds of sunlight is a small kindness, not a substitute for real support. If the heavy days are stacking up faster than the light ones, please talk to someone — a therapist, your doctor, a friend who shows up. Keep your eyes closed while you do this, and never look directly at the sun.

Tobia Bradley, CDC

Certified Divorce Coach  •  Ashby Jones and Associates, LLC

Lexington | Columbia | Charleston