Your detours write history

Every good storyline evolves around a person who needs to overcome challenges – a big loss, an unfortunate turn in life, a challenge too big to overcome alone. We get intrigued by those kind of stories and suffer with the main cast until the (happy) end.

Yet, in our own lives, we are quite upset once even a single little step doesn’t work – the delayed promotion, the reduced bonus, the unfair feedback. In movies, we can acknowledge how obstacles strengthen the hero of the story. In our own lives, we cannot even accept a little hurdle.

We feel that the missed chance to get to the one great university or the boring project we are stuck in the last 6 months will somehow diminish our life record.

We forget: it’s not our perfectionism but our brokenness that writes history.

Every good story has the deep, dark moments that feel awful. Noone wants to go through those times – but only in moments of dispair our heart gets softened, our sight gets sharpened and our values can raise to full size.

Dark moments in life always feel as if there will never be light again. You have lost your job – not just a missed promotion. You have lost someone close to your heart and your whole life will change now. You have lost your home or a lot of your savings. You are confronted with a severe diagnosis or you are even in pain daily.

All those moments throw you to the very core within you. What is your personal bottom line? What is still there if you have lost everything? How will you move on when you don‘t see a future?

These are the moments when we start to check our inventory: our beliefs and narratives. What holds? What needs to leave? What serves me? What can I let go of?

If you are at this dark place right now, please keep on walking – day by day, step by step. The morning sun is coming back. I know that it doesn’t feel that way right now. But be assured, there is a dawn.

And we can trust the storyline: your detours will write history. These times in life are great to find new passions and let go of old stuff. Nothing of these things will happen intentional. It is rather a process of pure survival in which you do what helps you most. But once the dark time is over, these things will stay with you. They have molded you to the new version of yourself.

It‘s a process that noone can force. But if you ever happen to hit a hard crisis in your life, have this little hope in the back of your head that whatever you experience in this time will shape you to a very cool new version – but you won’t feel like it at all.