33/40 - The Maze
As we do life in a tragic place, we are eventually wronged and wounded. Instinctually, our vision for life shifts from pursuing to avoiding. We just want to avoid that pain from happening ever again. As Chip Dodd says, “we don’t so much fear an unknown future, as much as we are terrified that a painful past will repeat itself.”
Often on the other side of this avoidance also comes The Maze. Not only does our vision for the future shrink to not repeating a painful past, but we become obsessed with getting even and proving wrong.
We were told we won’t make something of our lives, so we’ll pursue a career we don’t enjoy to impress someone we don’t like, only to find ourselves with lots of school debt and no validation. We were treated unfairly, so we replay the scenario on repeat, strategizing how we could have maneuvered things differently for a better outcome. We lose ourselves into hallways of hypotheticals and hindsight, hoping that if we retrace every step, we might rewrite the story or redeem the sting. Meanwhile, our mental and emotional energy is consumed by not living our actual life.
The tragedy of The Maze is it offers the illusion of forward motion, but we’re really just circling the same pain, hoping it’ll somehow lead us home.
So here comes the crux of it all - you can either live in The Maze, or you can live your life, but you don’t get to do both. Leaving the maze doesn’t mean pretending it never happened, but it does mean courageously choosing to live our actual life, not the one we wish we had.
We refuse to let the wound write the rest of the story.
“The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life - the life God is sending one day by day.”
C.S. Lewis