Understanding what you want

sometimes requires learning in 1,000 different ways, what you don't.

Uncovering who you are means first experiencing who you are not.

Finding the right person or people in your life

calls for initially letting the wrong ones in.

Life seems to demonstrate that there's a price to pay

in order to get where we need to be.

Patience, exploration, they're expensive.

They exhaust energy, time, resources.

But they are the only way,

as though one needs to dig a hole in their heart before fully understanding how to best fill it in. It's stepping back to leap forward. I've always believed the knows teaches more than the

yeses, the chaos more than the calm. We are tasked with taking our hurt and from it better understanding ourselves,

holding our losses and with them finding answers we once overlooked,

embracing our fears and alongside them becoming courageous.

That's why maintaining perspective is everything.

When we find that we've been slighted by life, we have to recognize that, yeah, maybe we didn't

get the answer we wanted in the short term, but still picked up something beautiful, something necessary. We still learned what didn't

work and saw where not to go. Because every step taken in one direction is a simultaneous decision

to not go another. To embrace one option is to neglect its inverse. Every loss is a data point.

Every time we fall, our worldview is shaped.

And that's not just helpful, it's imperative.

It's a brushstroke just as valuable as the ones derived from our successes,

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