“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly… but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”
— Maya Angelou
We are living amidst a time of significant change which charts to us individually across an array of major life intersections. We are encountering personal, familial, political, physical, financial, health, social and spiritual transitions, all while navigating our adventures towards the unknown.
I don’t believe that parting ways with any reality, loved one, endeared possession, or life space we have chosen to connect our hearts and stake ourselves to in any meaningful way will ever feel ideal. Change, after all, is uncomfortable and unfamiliar which immediately sends our spidey senses into flight or fight mode, protecting us from the inevitable prickly edges of transformation…
Like The Seasons, things change
Change is life
Life is good
My learning has been…we all want to actualize a rendition of our best selves. I believe much of that work happens along our path’s in-between where we stand and the mountain tops we hope to someday arrive at.
I take great solace in accepting that to live at its very essence… is to embrace with hope, and optimism the same change that also sometimes threatens to break us. Over the course of human history, most if not all our heroes, leaders and warriors, emerged during the height of their greatest transitions, catastrophes, oppressions and losses. I am reminded that struggle is necessary to stretch and transform us into the heroes of our own spheres that we were born to be. That the Universe needs us to be.
One of my favorite distractions as I walk along Chicago’s lakefront, is to watch babies and small toddlers passing by.
I’m always amazed by their sense of wonder and insatiable curiosity.
The newness that lights their expressive, excited little faces as they watch a red robin land and walk a few feet in the close distance. They almost always run with reckless abandonment towards them, believing with every rocky baby step they manage closer… there is a semblance of chance they might actually catch one.
I often hear it said that everything in life has a meaning. I subscribe to a slightly tweaked rendition of that belief.
It has been my observation, that every life experience can indeed contain insights that leave us with learnings and understandings we can choose to extract something beautiful and meaningful from. I believe that our greatest struggles and evolutions are our gold mines, where we gather the most valuable gems of our stories and life purposes. We collect the remnants of our beautiful struggles with the goal of living out the best iteration of our authentic selves while helping inspire the journey for as many as we can along the way.
It is my belief that any substantive impact we are to ever actualize in this lifetime, will result from mindful intention and consistency of actions we choose to put into practice despite of and during our inevitable, beautiful struggles. It is usually on the other side of the thing we didn’t believe we could survive…that all our grueling ‘in betweens’ are validated and transform us into who and where the universe is calling us to be.
In all my years I’ve never witnessed a child actually catch any of the flighty birds, along the lakefront, they so love to chase. And in the final analysis, I realize part of the magic is…it doesn’t ever matter.
If we might only endeavor to live with such a willingness to embrace and run towards a perspective of wonder, gratitude and acceptance of our own path with half the faith of those wobbly footed toddlers despite the knowing that we might never get that thing, person, or reality we so ardently believe should be ours…I suspect then the beauty of our struggle might have more space to bloom in between the wonderful, adrenaline rushing, heartwarming and sometimes even heartbreaking moments that amass the tapestry of our lives.
“Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.”
— Winston Churchill