I sat with a dear, sweet, old friend this morning, one I had not seen in person since before the pandemic. We hugged HARD. We talked. We tried to catch each other up on all the things that couldn’t be sent over text or in emails or even spoken of in phone calls. We celebrated the moments of joy we’d missed. Then, in brow-furrowed whispers and throat-closing sobs, we confessed the BIG THINGS we had stood before. We cried.
So little had changed, and yet so very much.
I know a lot of us are having moments like this these days. We are reconnecting with our people, with bits of our lives from the “Before Times.” We are reckoning with having dealt with so much while feeling so isolated. As we do, we come face to face with pieces of ourselves that we have left behind. We see in stark contrast the ways that we and others have changed over the last few years. For some of us, the BIG THINGS we have found in our path have created stagnation, a stuck-ness. For others, the BIG THINGS instead created opportunity. Mostly, I suppose, it is a mixture of both.
I don’t mean to make light of any of this. The BIG THINGS are hard, and a lot of times they… well, they really, really suck. They might have taken everything to get through. But, my friend and I, as we were talking today, speaking of our BIG THINGS and processing how rubbing up against them had changed us, we had a thought. As we contemplated how some of our rough edges had been worn away by the BIG THINGS, how we’d actually grown in temperance, wisdom, and perspective in working with them we thought, “Maybe those BIG THINGS weren’t actually obstacles at all. Maybe they weren’t standing in the way of our joy, our dreams, or our Love. Those BIG THINGS, maybe they were truly stepping stones TO all of the good stuff.”
Is it true, all the time, that the BIG THINGS are a path to our growth? I don’t know. Is scaling the BIG THING a necessary part of evolution? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I don’t have a definite answer as to whether the Universe or God or chance places challenges on our path, or whether they are “meant” for our growth. I do know that the perspective we take when we meet those moments DOES either allow us to stagnate, sink into hopelessness and helplessness… or to rise.
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