Imagine with me a world where you stopped segmenting out the difficulty in your life as, nonetheless. Where you stopped seeing the turbulence, as an unbeatable obstacle to your journey. Imagine with me if life was an orchestra symphony, where everything works together to create the whole. Where the high notes, the low notes pause everything to create that momentum- a tempo. Yet they all correspond to each other, in a way that none of it is useless or unimportant. How could it be?  

Without the low notes, the high notes don’t mean anything. Without the effort or work put into it, there is no satisfaction. It was the crippling momentum that created the magic to begin with. All of it is needed. Even when we don’t understand why. You don’t know whether this slow beginning will be the reason that you are soon a pinnacle to success. But how could we decide? We can’t. The journey flows like a river, pointing in one direction. You are in this river, with a raft. 

Look in our lives the obstacles, the chaos, the confusion. Here’s to going, when you don’t want to go. To moving forward when you’re uncomfortable, to stepping up when you’re fearful here’s to courage. Understand the difference between two things. On one hand, the fear presents itself while we’re growing, going up and far, soaring to new heights. We’ve all felt nerves before a big event or important life changing moments. On the other hand, the emotions that arise when we start to feel like something isn’t right for us in a similar discomfort but not quite the same as opposed to something we truly hate. We feel uneasy or nervous because we know we’re misaligned in the juxtaposition on what we want to do and what we are meant to do.  

Imagine that you are now on the edge of a metaphorical cliff and your body’s pushing back. Adrenaline pumps through your blood, your heart is pounding, your mind is racing, you’re nervous, you’re fearful. The question worth asking is “will I be disappointed in myself if I don’t go through with this, will I be letting myself down by turning myself back?” You must jump into the future, visualizing if your future-self is going to be sitting at a table, regretting and wishing that they had seized that opportunity, that moment, and rose to success on that journey or that path.  

When we think about it, it’s obvious that you can easily recognize it in hindsight the things that we stopped doing because they weren’t aligned to what we’re meant to be. When we stop doing the wrong thing, it feels like a breath of fresh air, like an entire step back to leap forward. Those times we stop doing what we are meant to be because we let the moment get bigger than our end goal. Those times we caved in and decided we didn’t want to pay the price, slowly because of the temporary discomfort. There is a pain of discipline or a pain of regret. Choose your pain.  

One of the things that makes life challenging is that we must be open to some level of discomfort in our lives. That’s just what it is to be human. Now our power is that we get to choose where we let that pain in and what it means what it will do for us. Will it be type of pain that grows us, or the type of pain that reminds us of what we could’ve been? 

I think that most of the time we stop, not because the path was wrong for us but because we somewhere along the way forgot that most of life’s best experiences, circumstances and opportunities come with a hefty price tag. They demand a lot of us to experience that inner pain. And in those moments, when the lights shine the brightest, when we feel the weight of the world coming down on us, it’s easy to misunderstand that discomfort as a stop sign. 

I feel alone. I feel unsure. I don’t have any speck of validation. My pride hurts. My inner confidence is shaking. Whatever it may be. These things we know, even as I am writing this out now it seems awful. When in reality, they’re just the cost of life’s admission. It’s like we must not know our destination before, because we will see where our journey takes us. Try telling yourself as you’re wandering around feeling nothing but that immense pressure, it’s a different story, altogether it’s a challenge.  

But here’s the good undertone. It’s a challenge you’re capable of handling and of overcoming. Life is about stepping into new things we don’t feel ready for and then learning and overcoming repeatedly to turn those experiences into iron and gold. It reminds us that fear is going to show up regardless of what we do in life. 

But to grow into the people we can become we have to understand, that fear itself is in its own unique way of teaching us the responsibilities and burdens of life, to be a human. The mental discomfort doesn’t mean that something is wrong, rather the opposite. It’s letting you know that you are the artist of your own life. Don’t hand the paintbrush to anyone else…