There are a lot of platitudes about life and especially about facing challenges in life. You can likely think of as many of them as I can, everything from the cloying sentiment of “when life gives you lemons” to the glib “That’s life.” I find those well worn phrases and cliches to be more than meaningless, they tend to elicit a serious eye roll from me although I do try (not always successfully) to keep that eye roll more internal than visible.

I have faced, as we all have faced, both times of great joy and times of overwhelming sorrow in my life. I’ve been fortunate to have family and friends whom I love, I’ve been blessed with work that has meaning and the good health that enables me to do all that I choose to do in my life. And I have suffered loss and grief, losing my parents and my only sibling all far too young, all long before their time should have come.

Grief and joy are not the sum total of our lives, of course. But they feel to me like the biggest mountain peaks in our personal landscape. Stress, fear, contentment, change, achievement—the elements in our landscape are many and where we are on our personal journey can change from day to day, even, sometimes, from minute to minute.

Compounding that, over the last two years, we have all dealt with not just unexpected, but also substantial, loss and grief. We have had to manage pressures, fears and uncertainties we did not even know existed. We’ve seen an unknown virus turn our somewhat predictable world into something completely unpredictable, defined by a pandemic. And we’ve struggled to keep ourselves, our families and our communities safe from harm.

The weight of all of this—our own issues as well as those of the larger world around us—is enormous. We can often physically feel it our bodies, a weight on our shoulders, a yoke that stretches side to side attached to buckets we must carry, buckets filled with all that we struggle with, all that accompanies us as we try to make our way forward.

It is possible to let the weight of those struggles become our focus and our identity. It is tempting, in some ways, to let ourselves be defined by, and subsumed by, those challenges. And the pithy platitudes that others may share by way of attempted comfort, or cheer, are efforts at kindness and concern but also meaningless.

We all know that place of darkness. We all know that darkness can envelop us. I would suggest that the only way to move forward is to give the challenges the respect they deserve, not to sugarcoat them or ignore them but accept that this is what they are. And then, I think, we must make a conscious choice to move beyond, to head back towards the light.

Someone told me recently that I was irrepressible, that I might have moments of feeling defeated but that my ability to move beyond always surfaces. What I realize is that we all need to be irrepressible and to recognize that being irrepressible, that seeking a way out of the darkness is a choice, always a choice. And it is a choice each of us is capable of making with a full heart and our eyes looking to the future.