Life is a Valley

“Life is a highway, I want to ride it all night long.”

With all due respect to the great country trio, Rascal Flatts, I don’t think life is a highway with some twists and turns here and there and then there’s a small dip in the road between this chapter of your life and that one.

I think of life more like a valley with big highs but with those big highs comes “valley lows.”

You hear so much about people hitting “rock bottom” as their very lowest of the low in their lives. What’s at the bottom of a valley? Most times there are jagged rocks ready to rip you apart to the point you’re not sure you can put yourself back together again.

Often times when you’re in that part of your life you don’t know if you want to put yourself back together again. You don’t know that you’re ever going to find your way out of that valley because even if you do you know you may lose your grip and find yourself at the bottom of the valley again so what’s the point in trying?

Look beyond yourself in terms of why you continue to give 120 percent of your effort to make it to the top of the valley. Who is at the top of that valley waiting for you to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and find those hand holds again where you can find that traction and start to make the climb again?

There’s one thing you need while you may that climb, that one that thing that’s going to keep you motivate to keep going, it’s the reason why you’re making the climb at all and the reason why you need to make it to the top.

Who is it that’s counting on you? Are there kids involved? A spouse who loves you unconditionally and wants you back from the bottom of that valley? They’ve tried everything they can to help you but because you won’t help yourself they’ve allowed you to make the climb on your own because you need to find that reason to make it at all?

We all have a story about the lowest valley of our lives. That’s the greatest part about life’s adventures is telling other people our story about being at our lowest point and being able to find our way back up again.

You don’t think you have an impact in this world but you have a story that other people need to hear because they’re at the bottom of that valley looking for a way out.

I might have brought this story up before but I’m going to tell it again because I think it’s the greatest illustration of the point I’m trying to make.

One of my favorite shows of all time, a show I still turn on if for no other reason than for background noise when I’m doing things around the house, was called West Wing. It ran in the early part of the 2000’s and it was a political drama surrounding democratic President Josiah Barnett and his staff as they navigated the political terrain of Washington D.C.

At one point, character Joshua Lyman, played by Bradley Whitford, had just come from talking to a trauma therapist after having been shot outside of a location where President Bartlett had just been speaking just a few months before.

He was walking through the lobby when his boss, Chief of Staff Leo McGarry, played by the great John Spencer, stopped Lyman and asked how it had gone. After a sarcastic response from Lyman, McGarry stands up and tells Josh this story.

“This guy’s walking down the street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep he can’t get out. A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, ‘Hey you. Can you help me out?’ The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on.

Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, ‘Father, I’m down in this hole can you help me out?’ The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on.

Then a friend walks by, ‘Hey, Joe, it’s me can you help me out?’ And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, ‘Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here.’ The friend says, ‘Yeah, but I’ve been down here before and I know the way out.’

The reason I talk about telling your story is you can be the friend that jumps in the hole with the man because while he thinks he can’t get out because the walls, or the valley, is too steep, you’ve been down there before, you’ve found your way out, and you’re about to help the man out of the hole because you know how.

You have a way to affect anyone you come across because you don’t know what they’re struggling with. You don’t know that the things you’ve been walking out, the journeys you’ve been on, the bottom of the valleys you’ve been to, have all happened because you needed a way to change someone else’s life.

Yes, those chapters of your life have been awful and there have been times you wanted to give up. But you had your ‘why’ and you found your way out of them to the other side of the tunnel where the light kept getting brighter and brighter until you found yourself on the other side of it looking back wondering how it had even happened in the first place.

You have a gift because of what you’ve been through. Use it to change someone else’s life and encourage them to keep going, to never quit, to find their ‘why’ and to find their way out of the valley.

Once they do, they will have a story that will change the life of someone else. All because you took the time to change their life with your own story.

Valleys are hard. The peaks are great but the falls hurt worse than any pain you’ve ever felt. Being able to take each of those in stride makes you who you are and provides you the opportunity to get stronger every day. You might have gotten hurt through that chapter but there won’t be a pain like it again and any time you feel a pain that kind of feels like what you’ve felt before, you can keep running because you’ve had worse and there’s nothing that’s going to keep you from the end of your journey.