“If you’ve hit rock bottom, go sideways,” Wynonna Judd.  Full transparency, I haven’t heard this song but someone shared this quote with me and the phrasing resonated.  Life has its ups and downs as a natural part of the course.  But there are times we know we feel lower than we have before.  We may even feel so dark we can’t find a way out.  I want to use this as a reminder that shifting perspective is key and understanding that rock bottom is a gift.  When we are at the bottom we limit the choices we see—but we still have a choice.  We can choose to wallow and complain about where we are or we can look around us and determine what comes next.  We can tap into the creativity and ingenuity that we feel in us.  Sometimes rock bottom isn’t a matter of having something taken from us, it’s a matter of showing us what’s really important.  It’s a stripping away of the distraction and the external stimuli to find who we are.

The beauty of being at a low is that we see our path isn’t always linear, or that if it is, that isn’t always in the direction we thought.  Sometimes there is another way around.  We’ve been trained to believe that these are shortcuts and that things need to be difficult in order to be worthy.  The truth is, our path is easy because it is exactly right for us.  Sometimes being at the bottom is simply eliminating any other way we can follow but our own—and it might not look how we thought or how we were trained to think it should look.  Creativity is a powerful thing and we all have it.  if we can look past what we were trained to fear and what we were trained to be and simply connect with who we are, the rest falls away regardless.  On the outside that may look like a failure, and without ample belief it may feel that way.  But the truth is that is simply the beginning of the path meant for us, the awakening of who we are.

I also want to add that I’m not sure who decided that bottom is a bad thing.  I think we need to recognize that in our lives there will be ups and downs, times we reach the clouds and times we come back down to earth to see what’s really going on.  The truth is the ground can be nice.  It holds us, it can energize us, it literally grounds us.  There is purpose in finding the bottom if we look for the reason.  There are also times when we need a hand up and times we become the hand for others.  We can’t do that if we are too far above others.  We need to find the balance, the answers, and sometimes we need to simply sit where we are and feel something solid beneath us.  We don’t need to fear the bottom.  We can embrace the gifts it gives us and continue to move from there.