When Life Feels Hard, Remember the Simple Lessons

One step. One breath. One moment at a time.

As I was driving my seven-year-old to practice one evening, he was cracking silly jokes. Then he said, “Mommy, do you know what the easiest thing in life is?”

“What?” I asked, expecting another joke.

“Taking one step,” he said.

I smiled. “Who told you that?” I asked.

“No one,” he said. “I was just thinking taking one step is the easiest thing in life. Unless you don’t have a leg.”

Adult life is complicated. Nothing is black and white. It’s not even accurate to call it gray. Life is more akin to a vast array of colors splashed across a canvas. It’s a swirl of vibrant blues, soft pinks, striking reds, muddy browns, and shimmering golds.

Up close it looks messy. But when you step back and look again, it’s beautiful.

The mind of my seven-year-old son couldn’t begin to fathom the complexities I’ve lived through. He wouldn’t be able to understand the choices I’ve made and why I’ve made them. He’ll never know all the tears I cried once I realized I needed to divorce his father and break up his family.

He was too young to see the sadness I lived through a few years ago, as I tried to hide my pain from my children. Older children would have seen through the façade.

I’m grateful my children were young enough not to be able to see it.

At that point in my life, I couldn’t fathom the joy and peace I feel now. Life back then felt hopeless. I was staring at a messy canvas up close through tear-filled eyes.

Now that I’m looking at the canvas from far away, I can see how beautiful it is.

And it all started with one step.

I’ve been through a lot of hard stuff in my life. Looking back I’m not sure how I survived some of it, let alone arrived at this place where I am thriving.

There is a lot of stuff in life that seems overwhelming. When we think about it, we feel a tightness in our chest and a constriction in our throat. It feels hard to breathe. We want to climb under the covers, curl up into a ball, and stay there until the storm cloud over our head turns into sunshine.

But often, the only way to get to the other side of a storm is to walk through it, one step at a time.

My son is operating from a simple worldview, but he is right. The easiest thing in life is taking one step.

As adults, we don’t focus on the one step. We focus on all the steps we need to take after the first step. Therefore we feel overwhelmed and helpless, as we imagine all the difficulties that lie ahead of us.

And we will encounter difficulties as we take those steps. Life is hard. Bad things will happen. There is always the possibility that life will completely shatter.

We will struggle and fall and have to get back up again.

But if we focus on all of the struggles that lie ahead, it will seem impossible to navigate through the hard parts of life.

That’s when the simple worldview makes sense.

The insurmountable is not surmountable all at once. But it is surmountable one step at a time.

Sometimes we can only see the beauty of the big picture once we’re on the other side.

It’s okay to not love every moment of your life. It’s okay to ferociously hate some moments. It’s okay to feel like you don’t have a leg and like you can’t take even one step.

But you can.

You can make it through anything.

One step. One breath. One moment at a time.