The Only Way Through

is through.

The baby needed breakfast. The kids needed to get on the bus. My mind was already moving ten steps ahead when my son walked into the kitchen, his face tight, his voice small but urgent.

"I went to the den, and I saw a real, live mouse."

I barely looked up. "Are you sure?"

"I saw it," he repeated, firmer this time. "A real one."

A mouse was not on the list today. My instinct was to brush it off, to keep moving, to not let a single moment disrupt the rhythm of the morning. Experience has taught me, though, that the smallest disruptions can carry weight. A moment of fear can plant itself deep in the body, waiting to surface later. The way we respond in these moments teaches something—about safety, about trust, about whether the world is steady beneath our feet.

I walked toward the den, still expecting nothing. Then I saw it.

A flicker of movement. The unmistakable dart of something small and alive.

I screamed.

My son flinched, his whole body going rigid. The fear in my voice—louder, sharper than I intended—latched onto him instantly. The air in the house changed.

There was yelling—his, mine. My voice rose as I grabbed my phone, calling my husband with words tumbling out too fast. There’s a mouse in the house. A real one. What do I do? My son hovered nearby, absorbing everything, his whole body tight with the weight of the moment.

The mouse disappeared, but the fear did not. The rush of the morning no longer felt like routine. It felt like a storm that had gathered suddenly, leaving all of us off balance.

The baby, still waiting for breakfast, ended up with a hastily prepared bottle before I buckled her into her car seat just to keep her contained. The usual rhythm of getting out the door was shattered. The bus loomed. Somewhere in the shuffle, my son’s Crazy Hat Day hat was left behind.

At the time, it felt like a small thing. Then I saw him at school.

When I handed him a different hat, he didn’t take it. He just crumpled into me, his face pressed into my shoulder, his body shaking with sobs.

This was never about the hat.

It was about the morning. The rush of fear. The way emotions bury themselves in the body, waiting for a safe place to be released.

I held him. He cried.

His breath was uneven, the kind that comes when a body is still carrying something too heavy to hold alone. I pressed my cheek to the top of his head and exhaled slowly, matching my breath to his. I put my hand on his belly:

Breathe into my hand. Inhale for three, exhale for three.

A rhythm I know well. One that tells the body, you are safe now.

His breathing steadied. His body, which had been rigid against mine, softened.

As I stood there, something shifted in me too.

I had been holding it all together—too much, for too long. I was the steady one, the one who kept moving, the one who made sure everyone else was okay. In that moment, though, I let myself soften. The weight I had been carrying came into focus.

Our nervous systems mirror each other in stress. My steadiness helped him settle, just as his vulnerability reminded me of my own.

I rubbed his back, feeling the full weight of him against me.

I whispered, It’s okay.

Eventually, we moved forward.

Stress doesn’t always emerge in the moment it begins. It builds quietly, mile after mile, until something small—a forgotten hat, a misplaced pencil, a shoelace that won’t tie—becomes the breaking point.

This happens often with children. They hold it together until they can’t. They push feelings down, trying to outrun them, believing that if they just keep moving, they can avoid the discomfort. Yet emotions do not vanish through avoidance. They wait.

I know this from running long distances. The hardest miles are rarely the ones I expect. Sometimes, it’s early on when my body resists settling into rhythm. Other times, it’s deep into the run when fatigue creeps in and my mind whispers, This is too hard. Just stop.

But I don’t only know this from running.

I know it from my own lived experience. From walking through hardship and coming out the other side. From the work I do professionally, guiding others as they navigate their own difficult moments.

Every day, I sit with people—students, parents, children—who are in the middle of something hard. I watch them wrestle with fear, frustration, and uncertainty. Their bodies tighten when they don’t yet believe they will get through. I have also seen the moment of release, the shift when they realize they can endure. It is never about avoiding difficulty. It is about learning to trust that even in the hardest moments, something shifts when we stay present with ourselves.

But what about the times when there is no end in sight?

Some challenges are not about a single moment. Some are long, drawn-out seasons of worry, sadness, or exhaustion—times when the weight of life presses down, not in a single burst, but in a steady, unrelenting push.

These stretches feel different. They ask something deeper from us—not just the ability to push through a hard moment, but the ability to wake up every day and continue forward without knowing when relief will come. They test not just our strength, but our patience. Not just our resilience, but our capacity to believe that something will eventually shift.

This is a different kind of endurance.

It is the slow, steady work of showing up even when we feel depleted. It is choosing to rest but not retreat. It is holding onto the smallest markers of progress when everything feels endless.

Some days, it looks like hope. Other days, it is simply the decision to keep going.

Endurance in these seasons does not mean pretending things are fine. It does not mean forcing ourselves into false positivity or ignoring pain. Rather, it means learning to sit inside the discomfort without losing ourselves to it.

It is learning that we can be both weary and steady. Both struggling and strong.

At some point, we all hit the wall.

That moment when continuing feels impossible, when everything inside urges us to stop. When exhaustion doesn’t just settle in the body but wraps itself around the mind, whispering that we can’t keep going, that we don’t have it in us, that we should turn back.

Pause here.

The wall feels real. It feels final. It convinces us that we have reached the edge of our capacity. That this is where our strength runs out. That there is no second wind coming, no reserve left to draw from.

But the wall is not a stopping point. It is a threshold.

A place where everything in us is being asked to stretch beyond what we thought was possible. A test of whether we trust ourselves enough to take one more step, even when we don’t know what comes after it.

Even in long stretches of sadness, worry, or exhaustion—something shifts when we keep moving. It may not be visible at first. The weight may not lift all at once. But if we keep moving, we find that what once felt impossible becomes tolerable. What once felt like the end becomes a turning point.

The only way out is through.

And when we move forward—when we learn, when we teach, when we hold space for each other—we remind ourselves of something even greater.

We were never meant to do this alone.

Each time we get through something hard, the next hard thing feels just a little less impossible. Moving through doesn’t just help us survive—it helps us grow strong. In running, in life, in everything that challenges us, we build our capacity step by step, breath by breath. What once felt unbearable becomes part of our strength. What once seemed impossible becomes a part of us that can endure.

We don’t always see the change as it’s happening. We don’t always feel stronger in the moment. It is when we look back that we see how far we’ve come. The things that once felt like walls became turning points. The weight we thought we couldn’t carry made us stronger, more steady.

And so we keep going. Not because it’s easy, but because we’ve learned that we can.

The only way through is through.

Each step forward, no matter how small, is proof that we are still moving.

Still becoming.

Still here.