It’s a privilege to be able to grow and mature develop at your own pace but what if life is thrust upon you, a loss, a tragedy, something completely out of your control. Where you’re thrown into a situation where you’re left to either sink or swim, what if you can’t keep up with the pace, and you fall through the cracks, no one there to help you, left to figure it out for yourself, ending in two possible outcomes: endure and persevere or unable to survive.
Unfortunately, most people don’t care, that is most people have their own lives, responsibilities, stress that they’re taking care of. Most people just don’t have the capacity, time, wisdom, knowledge and resources to help in the very individualized and involved way that’s necessary. There are those saints and angels out there, but they are so few and so rare. It’s just not something that we can reliably depend on to be there for us in our most desperate time of need.
But at the lowest of lows, we see and hear stories of the human spirit, how people are able to persevere dire circumstances and get themselves out, while many others that can’t. What’s the difference? Were they smarter? More skilled? Lucky? Better abilities? I don’t think so. I think there are many different people with many different abilities, resources and potential that end up scattered all over the map.
Maybe one difference is as simple as a belief that things will get better. But how do you use that belief in reality?
Maybe we can try to see things from the sky, through a bird but also seeing things from the ground, through a turtle. From a bird’s eye-view, life can be seen as a path, the journey as a whole. Then on the ground, through the turtle, we can take each day as just a day, not a defining, fatalistic instance. Each day is just a trajectory. Don’t judge yourself in the here and now, see yourself through life in its entirety as a whole.