I’ve been thinking a lot lately about moving through challenges. It’s an occupational hazard – you don’t book a session when things are easy, you come when things are hard. People come when the flow ain’t flowing, and we work to get it back.
I recently met with a trusted advisor. She diplomatically observed, “Some people are blessed with good fortune, and can’t understand the challenges that others have faced. It’s harder for them to empathize, have compassion, and understand.”
It was such a nice way to say – when you’re in it, not everyone will get it. If you’ve had a relatively easy life, the depths of another persons’ experience can overwhelm. I interpreted this to mean those in the depths need to find guides, or traveling partners who’ve traversed similar depths.
In my life, people on the outside often see that I’m happy. Almost offputtingly, strangely happy. Recently, I was picking up a rug from my favorite rug cleaner. He said, “I like you because you’re always smiley, happy and joyful.” I turned to him and said, “The height of my joy is relative to the depths I’ve experienced.”
Adam, a depthful dude himself said, “Say that again?” And I did, with a wink. I am pretty sure he got me. Heavy comments can sink like a lead balloon, and I felt fortunate that he chose to hear me.
And I want you to know – as one deep diver to another – when you’re in it, really in it, like so many have been this month, please know you’re being tested. You’re growing. (And in the moment that’s the last thing you want to hear, I know.) Whatever the situation is, you’re recalibrating, actively refining and moulding, engaging in a little neuroplasticity. You’re taking on the hero’s journey that Joseph Campbell talks about, like it or not. You may not have chosen this particular adventure, but the adventure has chosen you.
Ask not if you will rise, ask how you will rise. How will you meet the challenge? How will you choose to grow at this moment?
I promise you, the height of your joy is in direct proportion to the depths of your pain. I believe in symmetry and amplitude. And when I travel the world, I notice that people with less seem to carry more joy and contentment, bigger smiles.
People who’ve been through more have more life experience. They feel more. Experience more aliveness, more life, more vitality. Unless of course you choose to numb out, detatch, avoid and ignore the opportunity for growth.
Yeah, don’t do that. It’s like closing your eyes at the best part of the movie. Girl…and I say girl as a non-gender specific term, it’s more of a tonal thing – rise. Rise to the occasion. Rise to the moment. Rise to the challenge.
Call people to walk with you. Call the birds and the trees and the sun and the moon. Call me. Lord knows I’ve been in the depths.
Call upon yourself. And know that your future joy will be abundantly equivalent to the depths you experience. Allow the full range, the widest spectrum of life experience when life brings it. Don’t avoid, don’t dudge, don’t duck or run. You can’t outrun it anyhow, so accept and let it flow through you.
Because that, my friends and clients who are in the middle of deep existential contemplating, that challenge, the growth opportunity – that is what you’re here for in this lifetime. That is where you grow.
Meet the challenge and rise. You can and you will.
Yours,
Allison
