“Even This I get to experience,” Norman Lear. Ryan Reynolds shared this quote at the passing of a friend and colleague.  I realize I’ve been working through some of the darker moments of life over the last couple of years—starting a business, the status of my relationship, life and death, deciding where my power lies and what to do with it.  This year in particular dealt some rather heavy and nasty hands—facing mortality and witnessing the wins and losses that come with that.  I spent a lot of time on the precipice, the cusp, wondering what was going to happen next, waiting for the decision to teeter over onto one side or the other.  Life lived in limbo is not living, and as painful as the decision either way could be, at least it is a decision, there is clarity.  When we look at life and wonder about all of those moments that make a life, we can spend a lot of time questioning things.  Like we talked about yesterday, there is magic in people who are able to pivot, able to accept, able to flow.  Perhaps there is something different in their chemistry or in their makeup that makes them see things differently, because the best I can figure is that how we experience moments of pain and disappointment prepare us for how we understand and experience joy—and life as a whole. 

Do we determine the quality of a life, whether it is good or bad, based on those experiences?  Or do we learn to understand that it’s simply life, all neutral, and we assign the meaning to it?  Do we learn to not take things personally and learn to fill our role without pretense or the desire to get anything else?  There are shitty moments mixed in with all the good and, no matter how painful or frustrating, I have to believe that even those come with a reason.  All of life is an adventure and we never know when our time is up.  So we can lament the upcoming losses and challenges we will face or we can learn to pivot with them, or we can simply understand that those things are going to happen no matter what so all we have to do is allow them.  No one wants the shitty moments—and I find myself questioning the reason for many of those shitty moments often—but there are some things that we need to trust are exactly as they are for whatever reason.

I don’t claim to be at peace with anything that has happened over the last two years—if I’m honest, I’m not really at peace with much that has happened over the last two decades.  But what I do understand is that nothing on the outside will give me peace in these moments—it’s up to me to find peace in it.  It’s up to us to define what we learn from even those tough times.  It doesn’t have to take those moments of life and death to point out what is important, we are able to change that perspective every time.  But it never fails that those who are on that line waiting for things to fall to one side or the other see things the most clear.  Reynolds said of his friend’s experience, “And if anyone reading this knows someone parked at the intersection of life and death, you know it’s hard for them to see anything but life.  When the light at the end of the tunnel probably isn’t a cure, I think people see more clearly—focusing on the stuff that really matters.”  So instead of lamenting what goes wrong, understand that, “Even This we get to experience,” and be grateful for the opportunity to live and make life what we want it.