Here are five simple words that have probably crossed our mind more times than we can count:
How do I survive this?
Ironically, we spend so much of our life asking the question … while completely missing the answer.
We’re already doing it.
Survival isn’t reserved for catastrophic moments. It isn’t something we suddenly discover when life falls apart. Survival is woven into the fabric of every single day. It lives in the ordinary moments just as much as the extraordinary ones.
We survive childhood.
We survive growing up.
We survive driving in traffic, making difficult decisions, enduring sleepless nights, coping with careers that don’t go as planned and/or marriages that don’t flourish, raising children, watching them leave home, losing people we love, dealing with unexpected diagnoses, and making it through financial stress, betrayals, disappointments, and crossroads we never asked to face.
Life asks us to survive far more often than it asks us to be comfortable.
Yet no one really prepares us for it.
While there are countless courses and self-help books on dealing with betrayal and divorce, navigating grief and disappointment, and learning to rebuild after loss, we’re really each left to figure it all out ourselves.
And somehow, we do.
Not gracefully every time. Not confidently every time.
But we do.
And I think one of the biggest mistakes we make is believing survival has to look heroic.
It doesn’t.
Sometimes survival looks like getting out of bed when your heart is heavy.
Sometimes it looks like making dinner while fearfully wondering what comes next.
Sometimes it looks like choosing not to send the text you’ve rewritten 20 times.
Sometimes it looks like crying in the shower and then walking back into the world as though everything is fine. Sometimes survival is simply putting one foot in front of the other until your heart catches up.
And something remarkable eventually happens: Every difficult season leaves us with something we didn’t have before- strength, perspective and wisdom.
We may not have wanted the lesson, but life taught it anyway. Whenever I wonder how I am going to survive something, I always find myself returning to my father’s story.
My father survived the Holocaust.
Writing those words feels inadequate because there is no sentence that can adequately describe what that really means. He survived hatred beyond comprehension and unimaginable loss. He survived a world that tried to erase him simply because of who he was.
And yes, the Holocaust DID happen and while Judaism has been in the crossfire for years, we can’t erase history because of political divide. And perhaps the greatest act of survival is refusing to forget-because the moment we erase history, we risk repeating it.
But what has always amazed me most isn’t that my dad survived.
It’s how he survived.
He went on to build a beautiful life and found joy again. He raised a family. He laughed. He loved.
He chose hope when he had every reason not to.
Whenever life feels impossibly heavy, I quietly measure my own struggles against his. His life constantly reminds me that the human spirit is capable of far more than we believe. If he could find a way to move forward after everything he endured, then surely I can find a way through whatever is standing in front of me.
His survival became part of mine.
Today, life may look a lot different than in my father’s day, but we’re actually all trying to survive many of the same things. We are surviving hatred, division and anger.
Every generation has its own version of survival.
This is ours.
The challenge isn’t simply surviving the events around us. It’s surviving without allowing those events to harden while choosing compassion when anger seems easier. It’s trying to choose hope when cynicism feels justified. And most importantly It’s choosing humanity when the world encourages us to choose sides.
Because without survival, we have nothing that will heal us for tomorrow.
Maybe that’s why I no longer spend much time wondering whether I’m strong enough to survive what’s in front of me. My life has already answered that question and so has yours.
If you’re reading this, you’ve already survived every day that once convinced you that you couldn’t and maybe that’s the only proof any of us ever really needs. Survival really isn’t the end of the story. It’s the bridge that carries us to the life waiting on the other side of heartbreak, disappointment, fear, and uncertainty.
Keep crossing that bridge.
Because the greatest chapters of our lives are often written after we believed the best part of our story was over.
That’s my Reveal.
Love,
Karin
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