In early March, on a flight to Mauritius, my earbud slipped under my seat. A small, ordinary annoyance, until I reached down to retrieve it and found something else instead: a coin.
I assumed it was local currency, slipped it into my pocket, and didn’t think about it again.
What I couldn’t see in that moment was how unaligned I felt with the trip itself.
Externally, I was traveling. Internally, I was in resistance.
When Logic Runs Out of Answers
That journey surfaced more than fatigue or logistics, it brought up doubt, discomfort, and questions I hadn’t fully faced. I found myself caught between what felt right and what was simply fear, between truth and the noise of a season of change, between what was normal and what made me question myself.
Mostly, I was running into the limits of thinking, and the limits of what I’ll call the ego’s need for certainty.
I tried to think my way into clarity. Analyze my way into peace. Reason my way into certainty.
But some seasons don’t respond to logic alone.
Underneath everything was one question I couldn’t shake: Am I making the right decision, or am I just running?
A Coin, a Cherry Blossom, a Recognition
A few days later, distracted and tired, I held the coin out to a cashier. “Can I pay with this?”
She looked at it and said, “This isn’t a Mauritian rupee.”
I asked my son to look into it. He came back a few minutes later: “Mom, you’re not going to believe this.”
It was a Japanese 100-yen coin, engraved with a cherry blossom. A design withdrawn from circulation back in 2016.
To someone else, this might read as coincidence. To me, it felt like recognition.
Cherry blossom has shown up throughout the important chapters of my life, almost always at moments of transition. Its message has never changed: Let go. Begin again.
What This Means for Leadership
That coin didn’t resolve anything for me. It didn’t hand me a five-step plan or remove my doubt. But it shifted something, not from confusion to certainty, but from resistance to trust.
And I think that shift matters as much in leadership as it does in life.
We often imagine leadership as certainty, control, having the whole plan mapped out before the next step. But sometimes leadership asks for something else entirely: the courage to stay present without clarity, the self-awareness to notice when overthinking has stopped serving you, and the wisdom to trust what logic alone cannot resolve.
An Invitation
Have you ever reached the edge of your own thinking and realized the next step had to be trust, not certainty?
Dr. Joelle Samaha, PhD, PCC
Founder, PhiloLife Wellbeing Education Center · Host of Let’s Get Real 2 Heal ·
ICF-PCC Certified Health Coach · Researcher in the Philosophy of Health &
Wellbeing · Author of Le pathologique : une normativité vitale ? (L’Harmattan)