Like views from the metaphorical mountaintop, moments of clarity are soul-quenching. They give you an idea of the magnitude of the landscape around you. You see the path behind you and before you, you see both the joys and obstacles ahead, and you revel in what you’ve experienced, overcome, or been changed by.

There are moments in life – days, weeks, but more likely fleeting seconds – when we feel this way…as though we are standing on the mountaintop of our life. In these moments, our journey is put in perspective; the sweetness, our suffering, our longing, the closed doors, the wishes denied. We see our lives through the compassionate, long lens of understanding. “This is what I needed to learn in order to achieve that thing,” we kindly tell ourselves. “This was what I needed to experience in order to meet that person.”

And then the views from the mountaintop leave us. We are interrupted by our children, our partners, our loneliness, some powerful feeling we can’t articulate, our work; we are interrupted by the realities of life. So difficult, then, the return to the little things – the people and things we must attend to – the struggles we approach or try to avoid.

For those of us (all of us) consumed by the little things of life, therapy is a nice reminder that the mountaintop exists, somewhere (perhaps closer than we know), and that we are not dammed to traverse the journey alone. Help has not arrived, but is here, because we have claimed our right to experience the majesty of our mountaintop.

What can you do to claim that experience for yourself, today?