You know, life sure has a habit of refusing to stay tidy.
It can feel uncomfortable, incomplete, lonely, confusing, and at the same time strangely beautiful. That mix isn’t a mistake. It’s just the raw material we’re all made from.
Somewhere along the way many of us pick up the idea that life is supposed to run smoothly if we’re doing it “right.”
When it doesn’t, the inner critics crawl out of the walls and shout at us…
“What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you get it together? Everyone else seems to be doing better than you.“
It’s a trap, and it’s all built on a myth.
- Nobody has it all together.
- Everyone struggles with something.
- Everyone carries loss, fear, uncertainty, and grief in their own way.
When we let that truth sink in something shifts inside of us. We stop fighting life for being life. We stop trying to outthink the discomfort. And gradually, we make space for the fact that even the best relationships, the most stable plans, and the most heartfelt dreams still come with some pain and loneliness.
They always will.
That’s the deal we sign up for when we’re born into this whole human adventure: joy and heartbreak share the same address. The tricky part of all this is that we forget this constantly.
One minute we’re grounded, the next we’ve spun off into worry or self-doubt. We lose perspective, then something, a line in a book, a conversation, a moment of stillness, brings us back.
Anne Lamott has a way of doing that, and a passage from her book Help, Thanks, Wow hit me squarely in the chest recently. She writes:
“Life is much bigger than we give it credit for, and much of the time it’s harder than we would like. It’s a package deal, though. Sometimes our mouths sag open with exhaustion, and that saggy opening is what we needed all along. Any opening leads to the chance of flow.”
There’s something really freeing in that.
Even exhaustion can crack the door open. Even weariness can create space for flow. You don’t have to be polished or composed for life to move again.
You just need an opening, even a tiny one.
The more that we accept that life is uncertain and imperfect by nature, the less we blame ourselves for being human and when that happens, the body relaxes. The mind softens.
We exhale, not because everything is fixed, but because nothing was actually wrong with us in the first place.
Maybe that’s the quiet magic of remembering these truths: they don’t remove the messiness, but they remind us that we’re not alone in it. We’re not broken. We’re not failing.
We’re simply alive.
So the question you ask of yourself then becomes: “What helps you exhale and return to the flow of your own life?”
That’s where the real conversation begins.