You Can Get There From Here August 20,

2020│Raptitude.com
Kindergarten was only a half-day, so I spent a lot of that year at a babysitter’s house. She had two children, both older
than me. One day, the son had a big white cast covered in signatures, and explained that he had broken his arm.

At the time I thought having a broken arm meant it had been broken off, like a tree branch. Casts held the arm in place
while it grew back together.

I asked how much it hurt. “A lot.” “Did you cry?” “Well, yeah.” “Does it hurt now?”
“No, it’s just itchy.” “When did it stop hurting?” “I don’t remember.”

The sequence of events implied by his ………………… blew my little mind. This guy fell off a jungle gym, looked
around, and discovered his broken-off arm lying on the ground next to him. Then an ambulance came, and a team of
doctors stuck it back on and encased it in plaster. It must have been a day of the purest pain and sadness, yet at some
apparently forgettable moment, the horror went away, and now he’s joking around and it’s a normal day again.

I was then, and am still, fascinated by the way in which ………………………… are still connected by time. You
could be sad and despairing on a Monday morning, and be laughing that afternoon. In a matter of hours, the awfulness
– real as it was – has somehow evaporated and been replaced by an entirely different experience.

……………………… seemed to occur on every scale. I couldn’t get over the fact that Neil Armstrong had somehow
gone from being an actual baby in diapers to physically walking on the moon’s surface. This change could only have
transpired through …………………………. – crying episodes, feedings, math assignments, life lessons on the
playground, conversations in kitchens, awkward dates, cigarette breaks, walks to the corner store, encounters with
inky 1950s textbooks, and a million other …………………………., each one slightly changing what it felt like to be
him, until what it felt like to be him was the feeling of walking on the freaking moon.

There was no divine intervention making this so, no Hollywood-style montage obscuring the journey from feeling A
to feeling Z. Only the strange, all-powerful transmutation of one moment’s experience to that of another, and another,
and another.

In this sense, time functions as a kind of true alchemy — it can dissolve any experience, no matter how permanent it
seems as it’s happening, and replace it with another. It can turn lead into gold.

It helps to remember ……………………….. when you’re experiencing something difficult. Unbelievably, all the pain
you’ve ever experienced is already gone, except for what’s present now. Even the worst physical or emotional
sensations do transmute, with time, into sunny moments in the backyard in which nothing seems to be wrong.

(You can even watch ……………………… occur in real time, a skill we call mindfulness. With practice, you can see
pain and pleasure appearing and disappearing, mote by mote, and appreciate the feeling of impermanence itself.)

Naturally, ……………………… is hardest to remember precisely when it’s most helpful — when you’re at the
bottom of the jungle gym with a broken arm. Bad times seem permanent when they’re happening, and I suppose that’s
a large part of what makes them bad — the exaggerated sense of permanence they seem to have when looked at from
the inside. It really seems like there’s no path from this bad place to any good place.

Notice how the darkness not only obscures your vision in the here and now, but convinces you that there’s no light
over there either. We tend to react to each new dark spot as though it’s a cul-de-sac, slowing way down so as not to
bang our shins on anything. Yet the road continues, as we invariably discover, and passes into daylight again.

Residents of Maine are known for …………………………., given in response to a request for directions to a far-off
place: “Oh, you can’t get there from here.” Of course, you can get from any part of Maine to any other, or for that
matter to Los Cabos or even the Moon. But we know what they mean: I can’t see the route in my mind, so I don’t
know what to tell you.

Despair is a sense of “I can’t get there from here.” This feeling of being cut off from all viable paths is a natural
response to having entered a new dark patch, but it’s an optical illusion created by low light conditions. You can get
there from here. “Here” is always a fine starting place — in fact, there’s nowhere else to get anywhere from.