There are experiences in life whose meaning we cannot understand while we are living them. We can only see the loss, the ending, or the future we thought we were going to have. In those moments, there is rarely anything beautiful about it. We are simply standing in the middle of what is, trying to make sense of what was, while wondering what happens next.
And yet, time has an interesting way of changing our view.
With enough distance, we can turn around and see an experience differently. We recognize that a disappointment redirected us. We see how someone who challenged us exposed something within ourselves that needed attention. We notice the invisible thread between an ending and a beginning.
The experience hasn’t changed. We have.
Some experiences are not meant to make sense while we are living them. We have to walk through them first. There are seasons when life whispers, and there are seasons when life shakes us awake. Our instinct during those seasons is often to ask, Why is this happening to me? Somewhere along the path of healing, another question can begin to emerge: What is this asking me to see?
Years ago, I came across an idea discussed by author Will Bowen that has stayed with me: the concept of the sacred clown. The term comes from distinct ceremonial traditions among some Native American peoples and carries cultural and spiritual meanings far deeper than the contemporary metaphor I am borrowing here.
What resonated with me was the image of the unexpected teacher—the person or experience that disrupts our carefully ordered world and, in doing so, holds up a mirror. We may not particularly like what we see, and still, the mirror may have something to show us.
The person crossing our boundaries may reveal where we need to protect them. Heartbreak can show us where we abandoned ourselves trying to hold onto someone else. A door closing can finally make us notice what else is opening.
These aren’t questions we need to answer with certainty. Some things deserve mystery. Even without certainty, they are worth asking.
Psychology might call this activation. Trauma theory might describe it as the nervous system recognizing an old pattern. A more mystical perspective might call it a mirror. We don’t necessarily have to choose between them. An experience can simply illuminate something that was already waiting within us to be seen.
That does not make harmful behavior sacred, nor does it mean we should tolerate mistreatment because there might be a lesson hidden inside it. The lesson may be the boundary. It may be enough. It may be choosing yourself.
There is a difference between surrender and self-abandonment. Surrender is releasing our demand that life unfold exactly as we imagined. Self-abandonment is leaving ourselves behind in order to keep something else. Healing asks us to learn the difference.
As a therapist, I often watch people spend enormous amounts of energy trying to understand the person who hurt them. Why did they do this? Why wasn’t I enough? Why couldn’t they love me differently? Those questions can become invisible cords connecting us to people long after they have left our lives.
Eventually, healing asks us to turn the mirror around. Instead of asking Why were they like that? we begin asking, What did this awaken in me?
Their rejection may touch an old belief that you are unlovable. Their distance may awaken a fear of abandonment. You may have tolerated too much because you learned somewhere along the way that love required self-sacrifice.
These realizations are not accusations. They are invitations. Blame asks, Whose fault is this?Awareness asks, What is this showing me? That question can become a doorway.
Not every hardship, however, comes with a lesson waiting to be uncovered. There may be no pattern to fix, no boundary we should have established sooner, and no different decision that would have changed what happened.
There are times when we are simply grieving.
Grief confronts us with something we cannot negotiate our way out of. We cannot think hard enough to change what happened or find the perfect insight that makes the loss disappear. Some experiences ask us to do something much harder than solve them. They ask us to learn how to carry them.
This is where another part of the sacred clown becomes meaningful.
Bowen recounts a story in which, because of a miscommunication, the sacred clowns did not arrive on the final day of a Sun Dance. According to his telling, it was the first and only time participants had to be hospitalized for heat exhaustion.
What stayed with me was the role the sacred clowns seemed to play. Their humor and irreverence weren’t simply entertainment. They interrupted the intensity long enough for people to breathe.
There is something profoundly human in that. We cannot live indefinitely at the most intense edge of our pain.
This is particularly true of grief. When we lose someone we love, a future we expected, or a version of ourselves, we can become completely immersed in the absence of what was. Then something interrupts it. Someone makes us laugh. A memory makes us smile. For a moment, we remember that there is still life outside the pain.
Guilt can quickly follow. How can I possibly be laughing right now? How can I feel okay when everything isn’t okay? Yet these moments may not be interruptions of grief at all. They may be part of how we survive it.
Laughter does not diminish loss. Joy does not dishonor grief. Feeling alive does not mean we have forgotten what—or whom—we are mourning. It simply gives the heart somewhere to rest before carrying what is heavy again.
This is one of the quieter forms of resilience. We often imagine perseverance as pushing through, enduring more, or becoming tougher. Resilience can look completely different. It can mean putting the weight down for a moment, noticing something beautiful, and allowing life to touch us again.
When grief returns—as grief often does—we pick up what we are carrying and continue walking.
This offers another way of understanding the sacred clown: not only as the mirror that shows us something we need to see, but as the interruption that reminds us suffering is not the only thing happening.
Grief and joy are not opposites. They can occupy the same room. We can miss someone desperately and still laugh. We can have a broken heart and still experience beauty.
Two things can be true: This hurts deeply, and there is still life here.
Hardship has a strange way of stripping life down. When enough falls away, we begin discovering what remains. We discover our boundaries. We discover our voice. We discover what actually matters.
At times, we lose the person we thought we were supposed to become and finally meet the person underneath.
Pain does not automatically become wisdom. It can, however, become the raw material for it. Transformation happens in what we choose to do with what happened.
This is where grit enters the story.
We often imagine grit as toughness. I see it differently. Some of the strongest people I have known are remarkably soft. They have experienced betrayal without surrendering their ability to trust. They have experienced loss without deciding that loving deeply was a mistake. They have been broken open without becoming closed.
Grit isn’t always becoming harder. It can be becoming wiser without becoming bitter. There is a particular kind of courage required to remain tender after life has given us reasons not to be.
Our mistakes can be teachers too. Hindsight has a cruel way of standing at the end of the path and criticizing the person who couldn’t yet see around the bend. I should have known. I should have left. I should have seen it.
You know now because you lived through then.
We can take the very wisdom an experience gave us and use it as a weapon against the person we were before we had it. A more compassionate question is: What do I know now that I didn’t know then? Who am I becoming because I know it?
Think about one of the difficult chapters of your own life. Instead of asking only what it took from you, ask what it uncovered. What did it reveal? What did it teach you? What did it ask you to release?
If the hardship was a loss rather than a lesson, the question may be different: How can I carry this without allowing it to become the only thing I carry?
There comes a point when healing becomes less about understanding every detail of what happened and more about deciding what we want to carry forward. Keep the lesson and release the teacher. Keep the wisdom and release the shame. Keep the love without believing you must continue suffering for that love to have mattered.
And when there is no lesson—when there is simply loss—keep what was beautiful. Keep the memories. Keep the ways you were changed by loving someone. Moving forward does not require leaving them behind.
Moving forward can mean learning how to carry love in a different form.
Some people will walk beside us for decades. Others will be with us only for a season. Some experiences become thresholds into a life we never expected. There are chapters whose meaning we understand only after we have turned the page, and there are others we may never completely understand.
We don’t have to understand all of them.
Moving forward isn’t necessarily about leaving hardship behind. It is learning how to carry what changed us without allowing it to become the only thing we carry. To let grief have its place without giving it every room in the house. To keep the wisdom without continuing to reopen the wound.
Laughter is not betrayal. Beauty is not denial. Continuing to live does not mean we have stopped loving what we lost.
Farther down the road, we may turn around and finally see the thread—the heartbreak, the detour, the unexpected beginning—not as meaningless fragments, but as pieces of a life still becoming.
The most useful question may no longer be, Why did this happen to me?
It may become, What is this experience inviting me to become?
And when there is no answer yet, it is enough to look around, breathe, and remember: There is still life here.
