I drove through something miserable last week — doesn't matter what — and came out the other side thinking about you. About how we talk ourselves into detours that turn out to be just as bad as what we were avoiding, only dirtier.
That's the first thing I want to say: sometimes there's no clean way. You pick your mud or you pick your dust, and either way you arrive rumpled.
The tunnel is dark and you have to go through it. That's not a failure of planning — that's just the tunnel.
But here's what I've noticed on bad days, in bad stretches of road: something settles. Not peace exactly — more like a kind of attention that only shows up when things are unpleasant enough to demand it. I don't think you have to be fearless to move through hard things. I think you just have to keep moving, even while your stomach does what stomachs do.
There are feelings that will come regardless of how well-prepared you are. Your body will react. Your chest will tighten in the tunnel, your breath will go shallow at the edge of something high, your hands will do things your conviction doesn't authorize. That's not weakness — that's the body being a body. The question is only what you do next.
What can't be crushed out will find its way through. I believe that about fire. I believe it about you.
The other side of the tunnel is just the road again. But you're slightly different on it.
Yours, through every detour —