How to Find Courage and Strength in Dark Times
The following is adapted from Nowhere to Go by George Kalantzis.
The three best decisions I ever made came from places of hardship: the day I joined the Marines, the day I left, and the day I filed for divorce. These decisions all challenged my life story in complete, fundamental ways. It was as if the Universe wanted to suspend me in the unknown to see what I would make of it. These challenges forced me to choose between darkness and love. I had to choose my truth in order to move past these obstacles.
I could have kept running, coming up with excuses not to stop and reflect on my life. But realizing I had nowhere to go is how I found my true self. If we can’t face the reflection in the mirror, then it’s doubtful that anyone else wants to either.
Life is about learning how to accept and surrender to a full spectrum of experiences. There are no right or wrong ways to do this. The only thing that changed my life was opening up to the idea that I’m the only one responsible for changing what happens next.
Each of us has different interpretations of the truths that unfold in our lives. We hold certain truths to be so important that we refuse new information that doesn’t align with our expectations. We apply our idea of truth to the events in our lives because it gives us a sense of control. But the truth can’t be limited to what we want. Truth is all encompassing, and the longer you avoid accepting the broader truths of your life, the longer you will live inauthentically.
You keep every wound you refuse to heal, and you can never run fast enough to escape the effects of your past. You carry every painful memory with you in your journey until you find the courage to own your life’s story. You might think you have control, but if your behaviors and choices don’t match what you feel inside, you’ll continue to send confusing messages to the world, and your life will reflect an empty image in the mirror.
Alan Watts, a British philosopher and writer known for his teachings on meditation, said, “To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.”
To me, Watts means that we can find much of what we seek in our lives by accepting all of who we are. We all have dark times in life. This is when we must do some serious reflection, dig deeper, and find the courage and strength we need to move through the challenges we face.
Far too many of us are desperately seeking answers to problems in life. We try to fill the void we feel with external possessions, experiences, or frivolous relationships. What most of us fail to understand is that those things end up creating more darkness.
As the pastor David Crosby said, “To suffer, that is common to all. To suffer, smile, and keep your composure, that is remarkable. Suffering shapes your perception of life, your values, priorities, goals, and dreams. Your pain is changing you.”
Or to put it more simply: the pain we feel in life is an act of self-empowerment.
Unexpected life changes are fucking scary. I thought I had seen it all, but nothing compared to seeing the woman I thought I would spend the rest of my life with, in love with someone else. I felt like I was robbed of my life. The loss shook up my entire identity, and something dark inside me pulled me into a bottomless pit of despair.
I became a slave to darkness for nearly two decades. Dark thoughts at three a.m. were normal for me, and I developed an intimate relationship with death’s presence over me. Typically, I’d wake up and get a hard training session in or numb the pain with alcohol and sex. But the cold, rigid fingers of darkness suffocated those spaces in my body that needed to breathe, and I had nowhere to go.
Darkness wasn’t there to take my life, but rather to show me that all the places I ran to in order to escape were no longer options. My wounds were real, but they are not who I am. Suddenly, I realized the darkness wasn’t an outside force. It was the unexplored parts of me that I’d been afraid of for years. Knowing I could never outrun something I carried inside me, I found myself staring at the blank pages of a journal, writing frantically in the early hours of the morning.
Darkness has come, and I do not know why, I walk with him as he hears my cry.
Where we will go, I ask as he turns to me and points into the unknown.
My pen bled out on the empty pages, and each word freed me from the chains of my past as I clashed with parts of me that needed to be free. Rather than resist life, I gave myself permission to feel everything that came to wrap itself around me. Every word I wrote and every breath I took gave me the courage to let my heart lead, even with the things that hurt the most.
I’m not sure how I got to that point in my life. All I know is that I fought long and hard in the unknown to learn I couldn’t predict what would happen when faced with unexpected change; I could only discover what the Universe presented before me.
It’s so easy to run from our pain and try to wish it away, but time does not heal all wounds. The real relief we all search for comes from understanding that we can experience sadness and grief and still look forward to a better future. Embracing our pain allows us to build the resiliency necessary to meet our true, whole self, even if the brighter future we’re headed toward is not yet identifiable.
For more information on how to find the courage and strength we need to move through the challenges we face, Nowhere to Go can be found on Amazon.
George Kalantzis is a Marine Corps combat veteran with over ten years of experience overseeing collaborative teams and managing complex projects in high-pressure, rapidly changing environments. Today, George empowers people to move through the toughest days of their lives at The Art Of Tough Transitions.
A single dad to a five-year-old daughter, George lives in New Hampshire, where he enjoys the great outdoors and faces one of his toughest transitions to date — navigating the twists and turns that come from raising a little girl in today’s world.
