Life will hurt you. Everyone.

Life will hurt you. Everyone.

Does that mean we hide? Run away ? Let’s hope not.

The real question is whether we have the courage to keep showing up, knowing we won’t come through without messy, tough stuff.

We are not chasing pain, it just feels that way. We are choosing life.

Ours scars tell our story. The bruises, the string of disappointments, those goodbyes, broken hearts… they’re evidence that we loved, hoped, trusted, tried and cared.

It’s an option to spend our lives protecting ourselves, building walls. To avoid the things that might hurt us.

After all, once you’ve experienced deep loss, safety feels, well, appealing.

However, I guess we deep down know that playing safe is costly, making us trade. Rooting us to the moment, the certainty of what is in our now, which isn’t always a comfortable place.

It asks us to trade adventure for certainty, connection for protection, and hope for predictability.

We’ve heard the phrase… doing the work, putting in the time. Carrying grief that belongs to us, that’s given us so much & taken equally as much from us, involves us in doing the work.

That work could be taking the risks, showing up… as maybe what we are working towards is living with grief not existing with it.

The most meaningful moments in life get delivered wrapped in uncertainty. They’re untidy, chaotic, unwanted, misunderstood, beautiful, tragic …… that’s life !

It seems.

Planning to reach the end of life, untouched, tidy, neat & without scars. Could be a huge waste of … the one thing we try to protect… life.

There’s no way to decide how we’d like to reach the end of our life ….. although, if the general vibe was that it had been embraced , all of it .. the tidy stuff & the utterly horrid messy stuff. We may just discover contentment, however much it hurts.

If all we ever seek is comfort, we may avoid some pain whilst missing some extraordinary joy.

So I’ll choose the scars.

Not because I enjoy being hurt…

But because I never want fear to make my world smaller than it needs to be.

When my life is over, I don’t want it to look untouched.

I want it to look well lived. Stuffed with stories & pain …. Oh & many huge servings of JoY.

And if that leaves a few scars behind…

I think that’s a very small price to pay.

Keep chasing 🌟 🌟