~

*Dear elephant reader: if you’re single & looking for mindful dating or conscious love, try out our lovely partner, MeetMindful.

~

For all the blissful pieces of this world and the joy they bring, you will find that there are countless others for which the same sentiment could never be applied.

Maybe you will run into something, out of something, through something; or maybe you’ll never run at all. Maybe you’ll never learn what it means to put one foot in front of the other—fast. Faster than you feel comfortable. Faster than you think you can go.

Truth be told, it doesn’t matter how you see your capabilities in this regard, or that you see them at all. It doesn’t matter if you trust your legs to run, to stay clear of obstacles, to be strong enough to climb and conquer, to race from destinations you’ve outgrown in search of the bigger ones you’d like to try. For once, your perspective means nothing—because fact is fact and life is life and life will happen and facts will be involved.

It doesn’t matter how good you are or how well you do. The day will come when you must take it apart.

Everything.

When you run into it, you must knock it down before you can proceed. When you run out, you must deconstruct the need before you can create another way. When you run through, you will have no choice but to destroy the most delicate pieces of yourself as you go.

You will have to take it apart. All of it. All of you—including the the best of you, the things you call your bright spots, because even these things will change as the rest of you faces a rabid but necessary dismantling.

But know this: You cannot see the world as it is before you take it apart. You cannot even try. You cannot run into, out of or through anything and expect a difference on the other side if you fail to take it apart—your obstacle, your need, your storm, your vision, yourself.

This is the world.

Good things happen here. Bad things happen, too. But that means nothing, as you will run nevertheless—towards and away from both the good and the bad, chasing and escaping all the nowheres of the world and nothing at all. Even if you can’t run, you will try; even if you don’t know how and even if you can’t go fast.

Your expertise or its lacking, your speed or its improbability—they do not matter.

This is the world, this is life, this is fact. And at some point, you will have to take it apart.

You will have to take it apart over and over again. You may never learn to like it.

But in order to live the pieces of this world to their fullest, to take the slices of heaven with the pits of hell, you have no choice.

This is yours. Take it apart.

Relephant: 

Why Lying Broken in a Pile on Your Bedroom Floor is a Good Idea.

The Art of Putting Yourself Back Together: Moving Through Difficult Times.

Author: Sara Rodriguez

Editor: Renée Picard

Image: danabooo at Flickr