embrace what is daunting

“I still remember the shudder when I sensed a knowing as pure as fact—that I might only truly become my fullest self if I explored and stayed open to moving through daunting terrain…I wanted to explore in writing what I was beginning to sense about life—that discoveries, innovations, and creative endeavors often, perhaps even only, come from uncommon ground. In hindsight, I realize that I was focused on improbable rises because I was beginning to live with the gift of what it means to be underestimated…A division line positions creativity, innovation and discoveries as a separate, even elite, category of human endeavor: chosen, lived out by a few. Yet our stories challenge this separation. If we each have the capacity to convert the excruciating into an advantage, it is because this creative process is crucial for pathmaking of all kinds…Partial ideas do exist—resilience, reinvention, and grit—but there’s no one word to describe the passing yet vital, constant truth that just when it looks like winter, it is spring.”

Sarah Lewis, The Rise
Creativity, the Gift of Failure and the Search for Mastery

“Earthrise” by astronaut William Anders, image credit NASA, December 24, 1968