when the ground beneath you breaks open

thoughts on wisdom that arrives only through collapse

There’s something kind of cruel about the way wisdom works. It refuses to arrive during the easy seasons, when we have space to receive it gracefully. Instead, it waits. It lurks in the margins of our carefully constructed lives, patient as winter, until the moment when everything we thought we knew begins to fracture—and then, only then, does it step forward with its terrible gifts.

I think of the moments when this has been truest in my own life—those seasons when everything I thought I understood about myself revealed itself to be just another story I'd been telling. Like when I was 24, loading everything that would fit into the back of my small car and driving to Vegas with no plan, no connections, no safety net—just the strange certainty that I needed to discover what I was made of in a place that wouldn't coddle the old version of me. Or the slow dissolution of a relationship that had been my mirror for nearly a decade, forcing me to learn who I was when no one was reflecting me back to myself.

These weren't lessons I could have learned any other way. They required the full weight of experience, the pressure of real consequence, the particular kind of clarity that comes only when you're standing in the ruins of what you thought was permanent.

This is the paradox we live inside: that clarity comes through confusion, that strength emerges from breaking, that the deepest truths about ourselves are revealed not in triumph but in the rubble of what we thought we understood.

There's a reason for this strange timing, I think. When life is smooth, when our systems are working, when the ground beneath us feels solid, we have the luxury of operating on autopilot. We can live in our assumptions, our inherited patterns, our comfortable half-truths. We mistake familiarity for wisdom, routine for purpose. We don't question what we don't need to question.

But crisis has a way of stripping everything down to what's actually essential. When the scaffolding falls away—when we lose the job, the relationship, the version of ourselves we thought was permanent—suddenly we're forced to examine what remains. What we reach for when everything else is gone. What we protect when we can't protect everything. What we discover we can survive without, and what we learn we cannot.