When you’re in despair in the valley, what happens when you keep marching?  Eventually you’ll reach the peak.  There comes a point when we have no choice but to keep going.  Simply pick up and keep putting one foot in front of the other.  There are tons of sayings supporting this: “The only way out is through,” “Tomorrow is another day,” “This too shall pass.”   Moving forward feels near impossible at times.  It feels heavy, like we have to fight to even lift that foot and finding the strength to do it feels impossible.  Sometimes we need the reminder that we need to let go.  We have to release the burden that’s holding us back.  Sometimes we have to stop for a moment to catch our breath and find our bearings and in those moments, if we listen carefully enough, we hear what the next right thing is.

I propose that sometimes when you’re in despair we need to sit with it more.  We need to dive in further and learn to unpack what’s actually there, why we are feeling despair in the first place.  It’s easy to sit with people and hear their story and tell them what the problem is.  Like a friend comes to us crying about something and we have the answer for them.  When we have to dig through our own shit, it gets really uncomfortable at times.  There comes a point, however, when we see that clearing the surface level of shit isn’t enough.  We have to dig deeper to really get to the root of it because getting to the source of what’s causing the issue and making the shit keep filling in is the only way to stop it.  We don’t need to keep piling on and it does no good to do the work if it keeps coming.  We need to stop it at the source.

The key here is understanding that some of that shit comes from our own minds and we need to have enough wherewithal to know we need to take control—to stop and gather our bearings.  It is true that we take on plenty of behaviors and issues from outside of ourselves.  There are habits and behaviors millennia old that will not be stopped/treated/cured overnight.  There is a lot of conscious effort that goes into healing those things and even more that goes into applying that at a larger scale.  There is also effort in remembering what we are capable of handling ourselves and finding our path and responsibility on this journey.  As trite as it may sound, at the end of the day all we can do is keep going.  There is no pause or stop on this life—we just keep going.  We adapt, we move forward, we find ways to do our best.  Letting go of the despair only helps us to keep moving forward.