An Anti-Time Traveler’s Advice for Making our Mark
Our challenges help us to learn things that assist us in making our absolutely singular contribution. No one else can make the contribution any one of us is capable of making because no one else has been called upon to deal with the challenges that you have faced and learned the vital lessons you gleaned from those experiences.
I was taking a nice walk yesterday afternoon after wandering through my local Farmer’s Market, when just ahead of me, I saw a dog missing one leg, excitedly walking with a kind looking woman at its side. The dog seemed to be bounding in energy and excitement and, from all I could see, seemed to be thrilled with life and the world in that moment.
It’s hard not to project human sentiments and emotions into dogs since they have evolved so closely with our species that what benefits us very often benefits them and vice versa. And unfortunately the dog I saw couldn’t express what it was actually feeling or describe what it would be like to be in its shoes at that moment, but I certainly took some very valuable human lessons as I continued walked down the sidewalk.
Things we wish were different strike all of us from time to time. When we look back on those situations, we sometimes wish we had the ability to jump back in time and do or say something differently that we believe would lead to a happier situation for us now. While I too have those situations that I innately wish I could remove and replace, but in some ways the fact that we haven’t figured out time travel yet is actually a kind thing. If we could jump back in time and extract or replace certain experiences out of our lives, we still wouldn’t be able to predict the life trajectory that new path might lead us towards.
Maybe for one person, doing this extraction would lead to marvelous success but could also lead to a tragic loss of life much earlier than the traditional path would have led. Any action any of us make causes ripples in the lives of those that we interact with and the millions of others who we don’t interact with directly, but are connected by the multiple degrees of human connection. One person avoiding a car wreck could lead to someone else having a fatal car wreck. One person’s pursuit to avoid a broken heart, could lead to that same person not finding a different person with whom they might enjoy decades of a worthwhile relationship.
I guess in essence what I’m trying to say is that we should never look at someone else’s life and assume that that life is harder, or easier, or better, or worse than our own. Any beyond us not being able to cut out a single bad thing from our lives without changing the entire fabric of millions of lives, I believe that we build attributes, specific strengths and tolerances, and abilities based on the unique challenges that we face. In that sense, we are not made for the specific set of challenges we face in life. But the unique challenges mold us into individuals who can rise to face our kind of challenges.
This means as well, that we should never wish for the lives we see anybody else live from the billionaire tycoon, to the brilliant athlete, or to the well-respected author because they, just like us, are dealing with their own battles that they are being transformed to deal with. But that applies not just to challenges. Our challenges help us to learn things that assist us in making our absolutely singular contribution. No one else can make the contribution any one of us is capable of making because no one else has been called upon to deal with the challenges that you have faced and learned the vital lessons you gleaned from those experiences. So lets show up and speak up because no one else can do it quite like you uniquely can.