“If they make you better, that’s what matters. Don’t destroy something good simply because it’s of a source you did not expect. Don’t judge from preconceptions that inhibit growth: live, experience, respond.
People and circumstance come into our lives to bring about our change, our growth, and movement towards something better. We cannot grow if we are not open to experience and thereby receive that which causes change.
Maybe it isn’t what you expected. Maybe it isn’t the direction you believed that you would go, but what makes you certain you were on the right course before?
What makes a river break? What makes a river bend? There is something in its path that caused it to be moved. A life, like river’s course, is not fixed. It is always shifting. People and experience are the objects that move us. If we knew that it would happen, the course that we would find, we would have begun a different way. But we don’t know. We can’t know, and we proceed as we are shaped.
We believe our course is true until we strike something that makes us bend. We meet an object—another soul, an experience—and our course is changed adding distance, detail, and time to our life course still, and ever, shaping. We did not see it, we did not expect it, and having struck it and been moved, we know after it could have been no other way. We were meant to bend, meant to change, and we follow where we feel we are meant to be.
If you are moved, be moved. Cut the better course. We cannot anticipate the objects that redefine our lives and shape after a new direction for our future. We know only when we meet them and it is us that are moved.
Do not worry who it is, where it’s found, or how we’re changed. We are not fixed to a course, and that we have met another, or lived an experience, that moves us—there is reason for it. It’s all part of the journey. Follow what feels right.
We will still reach the destination for which we all are meant. In our bends and twists and turns, we are let witness to a little more beauty, wonder, and time before we find our final place. Enjoy it.
Don’t worry. If they make you better, that’s what matters.”