The Relationship We Build with Life

When I was younger, I assumed emotional maturity came naturally with age.

It seemed obvious. As the years passed, we would become calmer, wiser and less affected by life’s inevitable ups and downs. Time itself would do the work.

Life has made me less certain.

Over the years, I’ve met people much younger than me who carry disappointment with remarkable grace. I’ve also met people much older who are still fighting battles that ended years ago. Their careers have changed, their children have grown up, and life has moved on. Yet an old hurt, a decision made long ago, or a disappointment that never quite settled still occupies space in their minds as though it happened yesterday.

Watching them has made me wonder whether age changes us as much as we like to believe. Something certainly changes over the years. I’m no longer convinced it is simply the passing of time.

When I look back over my own life, I notice that the events themselves have been remarkably different. The questions they have quietly asked of me have not.

Early in my career, I was once bypassed for a promotion that many around me felt I deserved. I remember colleagues, and even my manager, expressing their disappointment on my behalf. I thanked them, carried on with my work and told myself it wasn’t a big deal.

But it was. Not because of the promotion itself. Because long after the decision had been made, I was still wrestling with it in my own mind.

For weeks, I replayed the decision. Had I simply assumed that good work would always speak for itself? Had I misunderstood how organisations really worked?

What surprised me wasn’t the disappointment itself. It was how quietly it accompanied me. It sat beside me in meetings. It surfaced in exchanges with colleagues. Even when I was fully engaged in my work, part of me seemed to be continuing a conversation that nobody else could hear.

The promotion itself was over in a day. My relationship with it lasted much longer.

At the time, I believed I was thinking about my career. Looking back, I can also see that I wasn’t trying to understand the decision anymore. I was trying to rewrite it. I kept returning to it as though one more conversation with myself might somehow change what had already happened.

Many years later, a similar lesson appeared in a very different part of my life.

As a parent, there were moments when my children made choices that I wouldn’t have made myself. My instinct was to explain, persuade and guide. Experience, after all, had taught me things they had not yet lived through.

I would often leave those moments believing I was trying to help. Only later did I realise that some of my urgency came from somewhere else. Their uncertainty stirred my own. Their choices challenged the picture I had quietly built of how their lives should unfold.

What unsettled me wasn’t simply their decision. It was my struggle to accept that their lives were never mine to direct.

Every parent understands this in principle. Living it is something else.

For a long time, I thought these were unrelated chapters of my life – one belonging to work, the other to family.

Today, they feel deeply connected.

Neither experience stayed with me simply because of what happened. Both stayed with me because of the relationship I carried with what had happened.

Over the years, I’ve come to wonder whether life shapes us less through what happens than through what continues to live on within us afterwards.

The same experience can leave two people in very different places. One person gradually makes peace with it and carries it no further. Another returns to it repeatedly, replaying what happened, questioning decisions, or imagining how life might have unfolded differently. The event itself may have lasted only a few moments. The relationship with it can continue for years.

Perhaps that is why certain moments stay with us for so long. Not because they refuse to leave us, but because we continue to return to them. The event becomes part of our past. The relationship we build with it quietly becomes part of our present.

As I think about the different decades of my life, I notice that life has never stopped presenting new circumstances. The details have changed endlessly. The inner work has remained surprisingly familiar.

I don’t write this as someone who has mastered that work.

Even today, I occasionally find myself replaying something that was said while driving home, or imagining a reply I wish I had offered hours earlier. Some moments end externally long before they end within us.
What has changed is something much smaller. I notice those moments sooner.

Sometimes, after carrying a disappointment for hours or days, I realise the event itself has long since passed. What remains is my own mind still returning to it.

That recognition doesn’t erase disappointment or make uncertainty disappear. It creates a little space. Enough to become curious instead of certain. Enough to ask a different question. The circumstances haven’t changed. Only my awareness has.

Not, “Why did this happen to me?”

But, “What kind of relationship am I building with what has happened?”

Looking back, I no longer think the defining moments of my life were the promotion I didn’t receive, the things I wish had gone differently, or even the decisions my children made.

Those were simply moments. The deeper story has been the relationship I gradually learned to build with them.

When I was younger, I thought life was shaping me through what happened. Today, I wonder if it has been shaping me just as much through the relationship I chose to build with what happened.

Perhaps that is what quietly changes as we grow older.

Life continues to bring disappointment, uncertainty and unexpected turns. Those may never be ours to choose.

But the relationship we gradually build with them is.

And perhaps, in the end, that becomes the relationship we build with life itself.