Ups and Downs
On how we meet life's inevitable "downs"
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Life goes up and life goes down.
Despite the part of me that desperately wishes life is an ever-increasing line going up and to the right, life has been teaching me lately that's simply not the case. Life goes up, and life goes down.
A lot of people around me have been beautifully modeling what it looks like to stay courageously present during these ups, and especially downs. What it looks like to fully face reality, to fully feel all of the feelings that arise, and to use the downs as part of the curriculum to greater awareness, awakening, and aliveness.
It's so easy to fight against reality, to resist when things don't go our way. Yet what I'm seeing over and over is that in facing reality, in meeting it with open arms, and in feeling our feelings without resistance, we're most able to meet reality in our creative capacity, from a place of fully resourced presence. That may mean adeptly handling the situation, but more often than not I've been watching these people bravely raise their hands, saying "I need help."
What I'm taking away from this is an invitation: to fully face and feel when things are tough, and in acknowledging that reality, to fully celebrate and feel when things go my way. What I find is my capacity to do one directly correlates to my capacity to do the other. In fully facing and feeling when things don't go my way, I'm more able to genuinely appreciate the sweetness of when things do.
One final parting wish for myself (and you): stop measuring life by the ups-and-downs, and instead measure it by how you're meeting them. Measure not by the outcome, but by how courageously you meet life as it meets you. Celebrate more AND ask for help more. And take on the challenge of seeing how kind you can be to yourself, up or down.
-Justin
p.s. Some thematic listening material 🙂
If you enjoy reading the Leadership Lab, consider clicking the ❤️ or 🔄 button above so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏. It would mean the world to me.
When I was studying Buddhism I tried to embrace the term Equanimity as much as I could—-when you fully embrace both the positives and negatives of life. It’s challenging for an - all or nothing thinker, like I’ve tended to be, and there’s the fear that if I do embrace the negative, I’ll keep going down that rabbit hole and I won’t be able to get the positive back.