Shining Through
Light Where You Least Expect It
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
Carl Jung
Life has a funny way of offering lessons wrapped up in difficulties. Projects are delayed, relationships stumble, and progress remains elusive. It's okay to feel discouraged. It's okay to wish things were easier. But if everything always went smoothly, you'd never know the strength you carry.
Knowing yourself, I’ve learned, requires more than a comfortable existence. It asks that we sometimes sit with sorrow, ask hard questions, and allow ourselves to be reshaped by the answers. We might think we want an easy life (don’t I know it!), but ease dulls the soul.
The theme of this week is counterintuitive: don’t rush through the hard times. Squint a little and look for the education tucked inside them. The tricky parts will teach you something that comfort never could, and that learning - while admittedly painful - forms a special part of your becoming.
Shining Through
The Gift of Difficulty
Loving the Questions
Golden Repair
Afterword: True Immersion
The Gift of Difficulty
Iguazu, Wolfgang Tillmans 2010
Life’s challenges aren’t something I’d necessarily wish for, but I’ve come to see them as an important part of my curriculum. Those moments of frustration - when I feel discouraged, held back, or stretched too thin - are often the ones that ask something crucial of me: they ask me to grow.
Seneca put it well:
“I judge you unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune. You have passed through life without an opponent - no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.”
Editing the Roman slightly, I don’t see hardship as an enemy but as a guide. It reveals who I am and nudges me to discover new parts of myself - layers that comfort alone might never awaken. And though I’d love an alternative, I know that real growth comes only from direct experience:
“There are no short-cuts. You have to stick to the main road, bumps and all, but it'll take you to where you want to go.”
Whatever you’re facing right now - wherever life feels heavy or uncertain - try to trust that it’s exactly where you need to be. These difficulties aren’t detours but essential parts of the path. Meet them without rushing to escape.
If you can manage that - if you can stay with the struggle long enough to see what it offers - you’ll discover that what felt like a burden was always a bridge, leading you to something unexpected, something ready to take its place within you.
Loving the Questions
In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke offers gentle advice to those who are struggling:
“Try to love the questions themselves.”
Our instinct is to resolve our problems quickly, to grasp solid ground again as soon as we can. But what if, instead, we paused and explored the situation?
Life’s transitions are where our persona finds direction. We may not be who we once were - and not yet fully who we will become - but in this tender in-between, there’s an important opportunity.
In the words of Michelangelo:
“Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”
And again:
“I saw the angel in the marble, and carved until I set him free.”
Whenever we feel trapped - in our stresses, in our struggles, in the problems we didn’t see coming - it’s helpful to consider these moments as part of the carving. The process isn’t always smooth or pretty, but, as long as the marble holds, there’s always the potential for something beautiful to come out of it.
“Don’t be frighted, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known... You must recognize that something is happening to you… Why would you want to exclude any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, if you don’t know what they are accomplishing within?”1
So sit with the questions:
What is this experience trying to teach me? Who am I becoming through it? What wisdom can I try to lean on? What else can I learn?
- and be open to the answers revealing themselves over time. We’re all works in progress, and sometimes, the gift of not knowing is that it leaves room for us to be transformed.
Unfinished Sculptures, Michelangelo 1517-1519
Golden Repair
To close, let’s say we that do break, that it all becomes too much and - metaphorically - the marble cracks. There’s a line in Leonard Cohen’s Anthem that offers us reassurance:
“There’s a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.”
The lyric pairs elegantly with the art of kintsugi, which literally means “to join with gold.” In this Zen Buddhist tradition, when a piece of ceramic breaks, it isn’t discarded. Instead, the pieces are repaired with a golden lacquer.
“There isn’t any attempt to disguise the damage, because the whole point is to render the fault-lines beautiful and strong. They’re there to emphasize that cracks have a philosophically-rich merit of their own.”2
Matcha Bowl, Japan, Muromachi Period
We can learn to treat ourselves the same way. Though our “golden repairs” may not be visible, we can sense them nonetheless. They are the places within us that say, “I’ve been broken, but I’ve mended, and now I’m something new - stronger, wiser and more compassionate.”
In life, we all break in different ways - through heartache, disappointment, loss - but we’re never beyond repair. We can weave gold into our fractures and make them a part of our story rather than something we hide away.
As one of my favorite thinkers puts it:
“We shouldn’t feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.”3
Afterword: True Immersion
When I say something like “sit with the questions”, what I mean is true immersion. A fly-by won’t reveal much. You have to land the plane, hop out and cover the ground on foot. Slowly… deliberately… step by uncertain step.
Do whatever helps put you in the mood: lie down on the couch, kick your feet up, play the right kind of music (see below), close your eyes and get into it. It’s only by journeying intimately with our troubles that we can ever begin to understand them.
Bon Iver recently released “SABLE,” a three-song EP, and it’s the ideal cultural complement to what we’re exploring here. Sometimes words alone don’t fully capture what I’m trying to express, so I invite you to take twelve minutes out of your day to hear and feel what I’ve been writing about.
Here’s what the artist has to say about it:
“The songs feel like an equidistant triangle, a triptych. It’s three, and it couldn’t be longer. It runs from accepting anxiety to accepting guilt to accepting hope. Those three things in a row. There’s no room for a prologue or an epilogue at that point. Because that’s it - that’s what everything is.”
Small moments of insight are gifts. If today’s notes added a little more light to your inner world, consider passing them along. Change gathers momentum when ideas travel together.
Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton