these economic craftsmen have treated the crash as a rite of passage*
(Richard Sennett)

Cherish your curiosity. It is your questions that will shape you.**
(David Delgado)

Beyond birthdays and various ceremonies that tend to be more party than trial, we probably don’t encounter many rites of passage.

And yet they’re out there, in the more more difficult things that happen to us: rejection, dismissal, loss, hardship … .

Some may be of our making, many are not. They do not define us, rather how we respond defines us.

Here’re five elemental truths that may help us frame and explore these moments when they come in our lives; these are: life is hard, we’re not as special as we think, our lives are not about us, we’re not in control and we are going to die.

These are posed to us in many of the experiences we face, but they need to be completed.

How we complete each tells us whether an experience has become a rite of passage for us, when, instead of turning away from what has happened, we turn towards it.

(*From Richard Sennett’s Together. These were men and women in the financial sector who’d become victims of the financial crash of 2008.)
(**From David Delgado‘s letter to young readers in Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick’s A Velocity of Being.)