It’s important to learn how to struggle and how to fail.

I don’t mean we intentionally practice struggling and failing, but both happen. With struggling, the tendency can be to not identify it as struggling. Or not to engage in struggling in a way that’s healthy, healing, and forward moving. We can get stuck by identifying it as a tough season but not engaging with it. We just sit and wait until something improves. Struggling is active. Sitting passively in the struggle state is exhausting and unproductive. It feels more like a loss than a possible win. I’ve sat in that space before, and it’s awful. It’s also difficult to engage enough to unsettle the struggle or see it from another perspective. If we don’t, we’ll atrophy. We’ll lose some of our fight.

As I watched the Olympics, I reflected on struggling and failing. When on an Olympic stage, the struggles and failures are public. Those snapshots of time will be scrutinized and memed. We don’t have to get stuck, but if we don’t know how to deal with it, we’ll sink deeper into the struggle and failure. Instead we wrestle, we filter, we reflect, and we can deal with the present in order to get us to the future. It’s not easy at times. It often feels as if we aren’t moving forward. We’re treading water. But we aren’t sinking in a quagmire.

We’re not on an Olympic scale. A huge amount of people are not watching us. But with social media, phone cameras, and more, our everyday life is much more exposed. It can be a good thing when healthy accountability is involved. It can be overwhelming as well. I’ve struggled well and not so well. I’ve grown through failures and gotten stuck in failures. I’ve embraced learning and rejected it. I’ve treaded water. I’ve felt like I was drowning. I’ve found a way to float. I’ve found my way to shore. And looking back, I’d say every approach or result was a type of struggling. Because struggling doesn’t have a specific outcome. What we see as failures can turn into growth that carries us into triumphs. We will rarely know at the time we’re in the low space, because it’s oppressive. It’s dark. It’s confusing. It’s exhausting, painful, overwhelming.

There is truth even when we’re not choosing it, even when we’re not certain of it.

There is light even when we can’t see it.

There is hope even when we are overwhelmed and confused.

It’s hard to choose what we can’t see or grasp.

It’s important to work on the foundation and find our footing when the lights are on. It’s important to strengthen the coping strategies when life seems to be going okay, because we often won’t have the bandwidth or clarity in the midst of the struggles.

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