Whenever I look back upon burn out, hindsight reveals what I couldn’t see before I got there.

It’s like climbing a hill and turning around to look back at the path you’ve taken… Only to see the violent, savage lantana you cut your way through could have been avoided if you’d taken a different path. But it’s always a path you can’t see from deep within the weeds.

Life moves forward, yet we learn about it in reverse.

The benefits of hindsight elude us until we’ve earned them.

So it’s important to listen to the feedback from those around us.

For me this looks like people telling me not to take things too seriously, or to stop worrying so much. It always comes as a surprise. My response of ‘What are you talking about? Of course I’m not taking things too seriously’ seems to wear thin and I can sense the tension behind their face as they try to navigate my own blindness to the weeds I’m caught in.

It’s easy to see from the outside - which can make reflection kind of painful.

The cost of growth is paid in humility.

Looking back upon the struggle, the scars and battles I faced, the epic dragons slain, only to realise they were all totally unnecessary for the greater mission… Is kind of embarrassing.

However… as unnecessary as the pathway looks from the outside, the fact that I took the path I did always comes down to a simple, powerful lesson that seems to go something like this.

My decisions flow toward revealing the hurt I am yet to heal. No matter how convincing my rationality at the time, whenever hindsight shows me the error of my ways, humility offers the lesson.