What If Life Is Always For You?

There’s a particular ache I think we all know — the moment when life refuses to go the way we wanted it to. The relationship ends. The door closes. The thing we were sure was meant for us slips through our fingers, and we’re left certain that something has gone wrong.

I’ve felt it more times than I can count. And here’s what I’ve slowly come to understand: in those moments, I was almost always wrong about what was actually happening.

Let me tell you what I mean.

The things I once grieved

Years ago, a boy broke up with me and broke my heart. At the time it felt like the floor had dropped out of my world. I couldn’t see past the loss — I only knew that something I wanted badly was gone. And today? I’m grateful for that heartbreak, because the path it cleared led me straight to my husband, who turned out to be the perfect partner for me. The very thing I mourned was making room for the very thing I’d been longing for.

It happened again with a house. I found one I wanted, told myself it was right even though, if I’m honest, it was never quite the right fit. I bid on it anyway — and lost. I was so disappointed. And then, not long after, a far better home came onto the market. The one that became my forever home. The disappointment I’d been nursing was simply life keeping me available for something better.

And then there’s the deeper one. The adversity I lived through as a child — the kind of thing no one would ever wish for — became the soil my entire life’s work grew out of. It gave me my passion, my purpose, and the reason I do what I do. What looked like only pain, looking back, was also a gift.

A 2,000-year-old story I think about often

There’s an ancient Chinese parable — Sài Wēng Shī Mǎ, “the old man who lost his horse” — that holds this truth more elegantly than I ever could.

A farmer’s horse runs away. What terrible luck, the neighbors say. The farmer only replies, “Maybe.” Days later the horse returns, bringing wild horses with it. What wonderful luck! the neighbors cry. “Maybe,” says the farmer. His son tries to ride one of the new horses, is thrown, and breaks his leg. How awful, the neighbors say. “Maybe.” Then the army comes through the village, conscripting every able-bodied young man for a war from which few will return — and the son, because of his broken leg, is left behind. Spared.

Good fortune, bad fortune. Who can really say? The farmer understood something the rest of us spend a lifetime learning: we are almost never seeing the whole story. We’re seeing one frame of a film that’s still being made.

Laozi put it this way in the Tao Te Ching: happiness rests upon misery, and misery hides beneath happiness. The two are woven together. We just can’t always tell which thread we’re holding.

You can only connect the dots looking backward

Steve Jobs said something similar in his now-famous Stanford address. He told the graduates that you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward — that you have to trust the dots will somehow connect down the road.

That trust is everything.

Because here’s what I’ve come to believe: so much of life is beyond our control. We don’t get to choose every door that opens or closes. But we do get to choose the story we tell ourselves about it. And I’ve made a decision — a quiet, deliberate act of faith — to believe that life is for me, not against me.

When you walk through the world that way, something shifts. Each step you take, you take in that direction — toward the belief that you’re being led somewhere good, even when you can’t yet see where. The heartbreak, the closed door, the loss you didn’t choose: maybe it’s not the end of the story. Maybe it’s the part where the story turns.

And only at the very end, when we finally look back over the whole of our lives, will all of it make sense. The dots will connect. The picture will be whole. And so much of what we once called “bad” will reveal itself, at last, as the very thing that brought us home.

So if you’re in one of those moments right now — sitting with a loss that doesn’t make sense yet — I want to gently offer you the farmer’s word.

Maybe.

The story isn’t over.