No matter the goal we’ve set for ourselves, there are always going to be challenges, hardships, and hard-learned lessons of which we are completely unaware until we’re staring them in the face.

These are the things we wish someone had told us to help us prepare, whether mentally, physically, financially, or most likely, emotionally.

In the moment, we can’t believe the oversight. How could everyone who’s walked this road before us failed to mention the part where it drops away off a cliff edge into the sea?

And so we must choose to either forge ahead or turn back, in either case, furious with having to face this challenge unprepared.

It’s only if and when we make it to the other side of the chasm that we realize the truth.

That maybe we were told but we weren’t listening.

Maybe we didn’t want to listen.

Maybe we didn’t know how to listen.

Maybe we didn’t know what we were supposed to listen for.

Most of all, we realize that on every journey, there are things that can only be experienced to be understood.

That there are rites of passage we must all go through, alone and unprepared.

That our destination is as much a singular place as it is the route we choose to get there.

And most of all, who we become along the way.

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