“Life is a series of lessons that must be lived to be understood.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
I prayed the wrong way for many days.
And I’m not talking about those comforting, peaceful prayers that come on days when we hope.
But those come with urgency.
Desperate prayer when the chapter is painful.
When we feel weak and helpless.
I wanted someone to listen to me, help me, and hold my hand when I got out of a place, I lost myself.
A maze I struggled to get out of.
Chapters in life where everything seemed foreign, difficult and challenging.
I stood there like a stranger, taking several tries to adjust.
However, I only found myself becoming lonely and distant. Didn’t really take the chapter.
And in this pain, I started to crack.
The fear of losing oneself overcame the courage to survive the painful chapter.
Despite my struggles and consistent efforts to persevere through them, I prayed for them to end.
I stood before a higher power, not as strong and brave, but one on the verge of exiting.
I prayed for departure.
Exit where life suddenly became an ordeal.
Like a huge mountain, standing in my way, revealing how small and incapable I am.
How much I wanted life to be under my control so I could feel my power again.
I wanted to make it simple, good and controllable.
So, somewhere in my despair and helplessness, my heart prayed to get out of those chapters.
But within that prayer, I envisioned a new reality, a new chapter.
These prayers were born out of a quiet faith that the next chapter would end this one’s suffering.
Faith was like a light of hope in a dark place.
I assumed the unseen, unread and unrepentant new chapter bore a beautiful face and I continued to chase it.
In my mind and in my heart, getting out of a dark chapter means entering into a new chapter, which I believe will be brighter.
This belief has strengthened over time as it has been repeatedly validated.
These urgent prayers, whenever I faced something painful, often proved correct because they were followed by better chapters.
So, I started to believe that this is how life works.
A bad chapter, then a good chapter.
This perception of life quietly became my pattern.
As I was doing, whenever I was met with a difficult chapter, the weariness of the battle began to distract me from the beautiful imagination of the next.
It made for a smooth, comfortable script that kept coming. And it became a kind of dopamine for my exhausted mind.
My mind slowly began to dwell on the next chapter, because in it, I could only see the best unfolding.
Maybe because that chapter hasn’t come out yet.
And in its absence, I have all the strength to imagine it in the most beautiful way.
Even when I didn’t, I hoped it would be better than what I had lived through.
The truth is, my mind was creating a best-case scenario, a peaceful picture of life in my head, because it was giving me some kind of hope and maybe some mental relief as I struggled with the present.
I had no idea what the picture in my head would look like, but the chapter I was struggling with gave me the strength to keep going.
Throughout these challenging chapters, these mental drawings of the future became my driving force.
What I was actually doing was creating an escape from current reality.
My prayers strengthened the belief that the only way it would get better was to step into the next chapter.
Despite my honest efforts to navigate, my mind didn’t feel ready to face the situation and then move on.
Instead, it seemed to lose its power.
And in that powerlessness, my fighting spirit was gradually replaced by the temptation to step into a safe place.
I stuck to this pattern until one day, when I found myself in a chapter I struggled to get through, only to watch it stretch and stretch.
Pain bypassed all my prayers.
When it dismissed my prayers one after another, I was forced to question myself, to zoom in on my patterns.
This led me to study it more closely.
After those unanswered prayers and endless bouts of turmoil, something changed.
Something I had never witnessed before because I always moved on to a new chapter before the old one broke me down.
But this time, my idea of redemption was shattered.
And in that fall, I saw a different reality,
Which I never knew before.
What is unseen and unread can be imagined as beautiful, but this does not always guarantee a beautiful reality.
The subtle truth of life, which took me so long to understand, is: the beauty of life is not in what it gives; It is shaped by how we respond to it.
We are either confused or ignorant of how life truly unfolds.
If we don’t evolve, heal, work through our shadows and wounds, a “good” life cannot bring true joy.
When the truth finally revealed itself to me that challenging moments are meant to turn us inward, to show us the parts of us that have yet to heal, and not push us into an imaginary, beautiful escape, something in me shifted.
I realized that my prayer to come out of chapter was rooted in this ignorance.
They were not prayers for a better life, but a desire to escape from self-work to avoid healing, to leave behind the lessons the chapter carries.
My longing for the next chapter means leaving the lessons of the present unfinished, carrying their weight forward only to experience them again.
And I realized that I could do the most dangerous thing for myself.
It is like a 10th standard student who finds it difficult to prepare for exams and therefore prays to move up to the next grade without qualification.
Will the student do well in the next class?
Do they really understand things?
Will they be confident to take on something new?
It is passing a grade that prepares a student for the next.
And so it is with life.
Just because one chapter seems difficult to skip doesn’t mean it will save us or make the next one easier.
When this realization hit me, I saw how I was pointing the dagger at myself, unaware of the pain it could cause.
I became aware.
I found clarity.
I saw reality and as hard as it was, I began to see the good in it.
My prayers have not ceased; They change.
From wanting a new chapter, I began to pray not to let it go until it served me all the way.
I didn’t want to run away anymore.
I no longer chased mental relief by hallucinating a beautiful, unreal image.
I now wanted to sit with my reality, however harsh it may be.
I didn’t want to leave this painful place until it served its purpose.
I prayed, don’t take me to the next chapter until I pass this test.
I don’t want to move on; I want to qualify this chapter.
I don’t want to run away from this struggle.
I want to win it, learn from it and grow from it.
And as I prayed, my mind changed.
I stopped creating a delusional future where everything was perfect.
Instead, I have come to accept and embrace the uncertainty and ever-changing nature of life.
Instead of wishing for one great chapter, I focused on being great when it comes to the next one.
The desire for the next chapter is not wrong. What makes it dangerous is when we turn it into an image of perfection, which is far from reality.
It’s not the next chapter we’re really looking forward to; It is the delusional pleasure we associate with its scripted image.
The deeper truth is that this desire is born from a broken relationship with our current reality.
And until we mend that relationship, we may step into the next chapter only to find ourselves facing the same lesson again.
As we learn to better play our part in the chapter we are in, as we pray for wisdom to understand what it is trying to teach us, we become truly prepared for the next.
In the end, it’s not about starting a new chapter, it’s about understanding the story better.
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This post was Previously published at medium.com.
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Photo credit: Europeana on Unsplash
