Life isn’t a straight path — it’s a desert walk. In this message from our Walking Each Other Home series, we explore what it means to actually engage with life rather than trying to manage, sanitize, or optimize our way through it. Growth doesn’t happen on perfectly marked trails. It happens through sunburns, scrapes, wrong turns, and moments where we realize we’re more lost than we’d like to admit. We talk about the illusion of control, the pressure to look put-together, and the quiet truth that most of us are winging it more than we realize. The journey isn’t about avoiding difficulty — it’s about staying present when things get uncomfortable, inconvenient, or unclear. The marks we carry — the wear, the scars, the dirt — aren’t evidence that we failed. They’re evidence that we showed up, stayed in the arena, and lived. Quotes: J. Krishnamurti “If one is lost in a wood, what is the first thing one does? One stops, doesn’t one? One stops and looks around. But the more we are confused and lost in life, the more we chase around, searching, asking, demanding, begging. So the first thing is that you completely stop inwardly.” M. Scott Peck “Once you accept that life is difficult, it becomes much easier.” John Keats “(To be) capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Rumi “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” Theodore Roosevelt (Man in the Arena) “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe “It’s all messy: the hair, the bed, the words, the heart. Life.”
