There are some songs that seem to grow with us.
When I first heard Joni Mitchell sing, "I've looked at life from both sides now," I admired her voice, the poetry without fully understanding it. Years later, after living through experiences that have challenged, and changed me, I hear something entirely different.
The older I become, the less interested I am in certainty and the more interested I am in understanding.
Life has a way of teaching opposing truths at the same time.
People can change. But many choose not to. They're comfortable with the familiar.
I had no choice.
As we grow we watch others grow. We watch others spend years repeating the same patterns, defending the same wounds, and arriving at the same disappointments.
Not because the answers were hidden, but because self-examination is among the hardest things human beings are asked to do.
Over the years, I've had to ask myself the same difficult questions.
It's far easier to look outward than inward. But I choose not to.
Circumstances are often blamed. Other people are blamed. Fate, timing, bad luck and unfairness offer explanations, but those things can't help, we have to take control, to ask:
What part of this belongs to me?
Life has returned me to that question more than once.
The tragedy is not a lack of knowledge. It's that the truth is already present. It lingers quietly beneath excuses, justifications and familiar stories. The challenge is not seeing the truth. The challenge is becoming willing to live by those truths.
Loss has taught me that understanding doesn't equal control. We can recognise the patterns, foresee the consequence and understand exactly what is happening, yet still not have control or be able to alter the outcome.
There is grief in that. Grief for what was lost.
Grief for what might have been.
Perhaps this is one of the humbling lessons hidden within Mitchell's song. The longer I have lived, the more contradictions my experience has revealed.
What once appeared simple as a child has become multi-layered and complex.
The wisdom I have – is not in having all the answers. It is in recognising the limits of what answers may accomplish.
Answers aren't always forthcoming, not from you.
People change when they are ready.
Truth arrives when it can be faced. Or sometimes truth doesn't arrive at all.
Life has a way of bringing us back to the same lessons, not always because we failed to learn them the first time, but because every stage of life asks us to understand them differently.
Perhaps that is why the final line continues to resonate with me:
"I've looked at life from both sides now..."
"I really don't know life at all."
