10/20/2026
I have become suspicious of a life that asks only to be comfortable.
I have not developed some affection for suffering……
But, I no longer regard it as evidence that something has gone terribly wrong.
There are things I know now that I could never have learned in gentler rooms.
Loss taught me the weight of what I love.
Disappointment cured me of certain illusions.
Heartbreak introduced me to chambers within myself I might otherwise have lived an entire lifetime without entering.
And failure, perhaps the least elegant teacher of all, has a remarkable way of removing everything ornamental until only the essential remains.
We are so quick to call one thing good and another bad:
The marriage is working: good.
It ends: bad.
The business flourishes: good.
It collapses: bad.
Someone chooses us: good.
Someone leaves: bad.
But life, in its peculiar intelligence, is rarely so tidy. Sometimes the thing that wounds you is also the thing that introduces you to your own depth.
Sometimes the closed door saves decades.
Sometimes what looks like an ending is simply life refusing to let you remain loyal to a smaller existence.
I have begun to think of it as contrast.
We know warmth because we have shivered.
We recognize peace because somewhere in our history there was noise.
We understand devotion because we have known its absence.
And perhaps we recognize the light within us because there have been hours when we have had to search for it in the dark.
THAT light interests me.
The small, interior flame that remains when circumstances become uncooperative.
When the prayer has not yet been answered.
When the person leaves.
When the money changes.
When the body changes.
When the carefully drawn map of your life is suddenly of no use whatsoever.
What remains then?
That may be one of the most important questions of a human life.
I am becoming increasingly comfortable standing there.
Not rushing to anesthetize the ache.
Not demanding an immediate explanation.
Not decorating suffering with platitudes so I can make it prettier than it is.
Just allowing contrast to do its peculiar work.
Because I have noticed something:
Fire does not merely destroy.
Under the right conditions, it tempers.
It takes what was once susceptible to pressure and alters its constitution.
Perhaps greatness is something like that.
Not a life spared from the furnace, but a life that has passed through enough fire to discover what cannot be burned.
And somewhere beneath our titles, our relationships, our accomplishments, our possessions, our carefully tended identities……there is something incandescent, something so bright it just about sits at that line that allows us to experience it… any brighter we’d miss it.
Something circumstance did not give us.
And therefore circumstance cannot take away.
These days, I am far more interested in tending that.
