When Life Demands the Most of You
On Preparing Physically, Emotionally, and Spiritually for the Moments That Matter
Just three short years ago I was in a place of complete and utter despair. I felt entirely incapable of handling the everyday bumps in the road that life presented me with. I worked tirelessly to change my situation and obsessively hid those struggles from the outside world out of shame. I was tired, afraid, and alone; I knew things had to change, but I didn’t know how.
I was falling apart physically, drinking enough in isolation to begin taking measurable and noticeable tolls on my body. I was an emotional wreck, as the everyday flow of life played out and my reactions sent me on white-knuckle rides of reactivity. I was spiritually lost, having given up on finding any purpose or meaning in my life.
Finally, after completely giving up and trying to end it all, I relented. Guided by the few in my life who hadn’t left my side, I ended up in rehab.
I decided early on in my recovery journey that I wasn’t going to spin my wheels alone anymore. I clearly understood that when action was required, I — and I alone — was the one required to vigorously take that action; but I was no longer going to retreat into isolation. I was going to listen, find ways to trust again, and work with others to find a solution to the destruction that alcoholism was bringing into my life.
I knew I had to focus on strengthening myself physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I had been collapsing under the strain of life and became resolved to build strength and resiliency to ready myself for life outside of the safety of rehab.
Physically, I had degraded to the point that I knew I wouldn’t be able to show up when it mattered most. I could feel my body slowing down, silently wasting away. It wasn’t a matter of having superhero strength or speed; it was about having the baseline capability to be there when life demanded it of me. I began taking simple steps to care for my body and mind and quickly started thinking more clearly and feeling better.
Emotionally, I attempted to stop or suppress any emotion from ever occurring and chastised myself when I uncomfortably felt the aftershock of an emotion coursing through my system. I strove to learn how to accept the emotions that can’t be controlled and sit, even when uncomfortable, with the natural highs and lows that they bring. I worked to ensure that those emotions didn’t carry me off as they had in the past.
Spiritually, I was empty. I had traversed from obligatory pew sitter, to atheist, to agnostic to “spiritual,” to nihilism. Confusion abounded and life had lost all meaning. I couldn’t understand. I found a way to establish a deeply personal and one-on-one relationship with God. No evangelizing. No unquestioned reliance on another human. Just a real relationship and trust in something greater than me.
It worked. I could feel it.
I didn’t realize at the time that what I was discovering and incorporating into my life would be tested again — this time at a level I could never have imagined.
For fifty-seven days, life seemed impossibly good. Fifty-seven days of envisioning a life together without the chaos of alcohol. Fifty-seven days until we had our entire world turned upside down.
Six months later we walked out of the hospital without our daughter. The burden of the loss felt too great, and we could sense immediately we did not understand the path we needed to travel.
Unexpectedly, we found progress by returning to the same language, mindset, and action I had learned after leaving rehab. It was a completely different hardship, but we found ourselves returning to the basics of our physical, emotional and spiritual well-being, just as before.
Amidst the pain of loss, it felt right. We worked on acceptance of the difficulties we had been given, focused on the progress we could make, and aimed to walk with others who had preceded us when they were open to guiding us.
The parallels of these two journeys were striking and impossible to ignore. I found that the early mindset and practices that I had established in addiction recovery were honed, sharpened, and forged into our daily lives after the loss of our daughter. What had permitted me to move forward and establish an impossibly satisfying life after addiction was also permitting us as a couple to reclaim our lives as we navigated a road no parent should have to travel.
To facilitate our healing and growth during the tumultuous months and years following my time in rehab, I grounded myself in a set of five daily practices. They were simple, repeatable, unsexy, and approachable. Yet they challenged me, kept me in line and allowed me to maintain incremental progress toward strengthening my pillars of physical, emotional and spiritual fitness each day. They kept me from slipping backward and taught me how to move forward with grace.
They were the engine that powered the progress.
As the challenges in life grew as we navigated our daughter’s life and departure from this earth, I began seeing things more clearly. I suddenly realized the importance of these three pillars I had established in early recovery.
They are how life delivers its greatest challenges to us. All of us, at both the macro and micro level, will be challenged physically, emotionally, and spiritually as we trudge the roads of our lives. Sometimes we seek that challenge ourselves, but more often life unexpectedly applies pressure in these areas.
Every stage of life will naturally bring with it new forms of these challenges, but regardless of the stage that you’re in, preparation, focus and the daily discipline to act are needed if we are to rise up to those occasions that life will demand of us.
There are no hacks, no optimization techniques and no shortcuts that will be obsessed over here.
This will be a focus on the daily art of living that builds within us the foundation to rise up and meet the physical, emotional and spiritual challenges that life will generate. It is not a defensive or passive position; it is going out to meet life on its terms, determined to show up and live the greatest life possible.
If this resonates, you’re not alone.
And if you know someone who might need these words right now, I invite you to share this with them.
This is what More Than Capable is built on.
Not hacks. Not shortcuts. Not avoidance.
Just the daily, disciplined work of preparing ourselves — physically, emotionally, and spiritually — to meet life when it demands the most of us.
We don’t do it alone.
Kyle Layne (Kyle Zibrowski)