Sitting In The Mud

I love doing hard things. Always have. There's something about pushing yourself through something difficult that makes everything else easier. When I've slogged away for more than 3 hours running, the rest of my day seems simple in comparison. I'm never going to win any races. That's fine. Winning for me is being better today than I was yesterday. Not faster, not stronger, just better.

Challenging yourself build’s you up. Forces you to develop strength you didn't know you needed. You simply can’t learn to climb obstacles by going around them, or asking for a ladder. You have to overcome them, grow, adapt and better yourself. With that said, not everything difficult is a challenge you can overcome by pushing harder.

Some pits you can't climb out of. The mud's too thick. Your brain's too foggy. You don't even know which direction is up, let alone how to start climbing. I've been in a few of those. I've watched people I care about stuck in them too, and I've noticed something about how people respond when someone's struggling.

Most people want to help by offering solutions. "Have you tried this?" "What if you did that?" "Here's what worked for me." It comes from a good place. People have a natural desire to fix things. I do it too, but occasionally the problem isn't that someone doesn't know what to do. Perhaps they're just exhausted. Overwhelmed. Stuck in a situation where all the advice in the world doesn't help because they don't have the energy or clarity to act on it.

Those times, they don't need your advice. They need you to shut up and sit down in the mud next to them. Not to pull them out. Not to motivate them. Not to share your story about when you were in the mud. Just to sit there and acknowledge that this is hard, and it's OK that it's hard. That they're not failing because they can't climb out right now.

That's much harder than giving advice. It often feels like you're doing nothing. But sometimes being present is the only thing that helps. Sometimes just knowing someone sees you and isn't judging you for being stuck is what you need to eventually find your way out.