Sometimes it's not where you are but where you've been

​I'm not sure there's a bigger piece of wisdom I wish I'd had long before I received it than this: sometimes what you're dealing with right now isn't what you're dealing with right now.

The last few years I've come to realize, the most challenging part of my life hasn't been what's felt like an endless string of challenges, it's that most of the time I was never battling the right challenges.

Fighting challenges is hard. Fighting the wrong ones is exhausting. It can leave you feeling like a failure. Hopeless.

So often we are living in the emotions of a problem we see, when those emotions are really tied to a problem we can't see.

Or we refuse to see.

It's a scary trip for some of us - to start getting curious about the problems we don't see. It takes bravery to wonder if the fight in front of me has anything to do with the fights behind me. It's ironic, though, when you do go there, when you go to the unseen, you can begin to see life more clearly than ever.

It's an ugly but at the same time beautiful journey to go there.

Ugly, because it's not always easy to go where you never wanted to go again - whether you actually knew that or not. Beautiful, though, because you can suddenly start making sense of the things that you've worked so hard not to sense.

It's a personal journey, but it goes a long way to helping us understand interpersonal journeys. Because if I'm bringing emotions to an interaction that aren't really dealing with what I'm dealing with right now, maybe that's true of you as well. So maybe some of the fights we end up in aren't fights about where we are right now together, but where we each of us have individually been before.

I think it's something worth all of us considering.

I know it's a journey worth all of us taking, if we dare take it.

Trust me, I know it's hard. It's a journey many of us put off for years and maybe decades. Maybe we're waiting for the right time. Maybe we waited until the wrong time. Either way, there's sort of a new beginning that can happen in life when we start battling the right challenges.

In ourselves, and with each other.