It can be easy to look at the lives of those around you, or the lives of those you admire, and think we’re living wrong. And then wonder what’s wrong with you for not progressing in that same clean, upward line. But that straight uninterrupted line you see is an illusion. We do this thing where we turn other people’s lives into a tidy storyline. Every choice looks obvious. “Sure that promotion, move or relationship was always going to happen.” When we look backward, it can seem only logical that somebody’s life went a certain way. We see success and think it was inevitable for others, and not us.
That’s why I think it can be helpful to look at life not as a straight line, but as a winding river. Have you ever looked at a map of any river. It’s enormous. It flows through mountains, rainforests, and lowlands. It’s fed by over 1,100 other bodies of water, some of which are over 900 miles long. Some parts are windy like a snake, some parts are thick, some parts of the river the water flows fast and in others, it flows slowly. From where you’re standing, you only ever see the success of others from the shoreline, when they’re arriving somewhere. You see the moment they land the job, meet the partner, launch the thing. You don’t see the quiet stretches, the rapids, the days they were stuck in the rocks questioning everything. You’d have to live in the boat with them, every single day, to see the downturns and detours. And that’s just not realistic.
It also means this: just because you’re in a turning tide right now, or tangled in some heavy seaweed, doesn’t mean the water has stopped moving for you. Your river is still flowing, even if it feels slow or shallow. You are always going somewhere. And when you reach your next shoreline, other people will see that moment and decide it all “made sense” for you too.