6. The Pulse Of Persistence

Life’s refusal to stop for our pain is not a punishment – It is the mechanism of our healing.

An interaction I’ll always remember is when I had booked an uber. My driver was a man named Bekim, half Croatian, half Albanian, somewhere in his late 40s. He had more history to his name than one could imagine, a mouth that held a passion to express the chaos of politics; a heart which held tightly his culture and sole identity. He held a contained fatherly anger towards the world, as he spoke about his 8-year-old daughter and how her teachers didn’t bother to grasp the beauties and melodies of her rich name. He had transformed my hour journey to a few minutes. A few minutes that poured the presence of meeting someone who you needed to meet, to tell you what you needed to hear.

As I sat quietly listening, he advised me to keep fighting- to never give up even if the entire world was against me. Alas we had reached my destination and the journey ended with him becoming a stranger once again, a stranger who changed my perspectives – a stranger whose name ill never be able to erase from my mind. One thing he said that I’ll never forget is – ‘you’re not allowed to worry about problems that have solutions.’

Three years later, I’ve come to understand the sole meaning behind what he meant. As humans we tend to view inconveniences as a jarring concept, and in some cases, a catastrophe. How many times have we utterly lost it over small things, like our car breaking down, not getting immediate text replies, losing things, plans being ruined. We bleed energy that we don’t even have to begin with into things that was never ours to carry. These things aren’t unsolvable; they are just uncomfortable because we want perfection out of our lives instead of just rolling with the punches.

Inconvenience isn’t a catastrophe, as annoying and uncomfortable it is to have a pebble in your shoe, they are not boulders in our path. They are things we can deal with and keep walking; it’s not something that completely stops us. If we fall apart over the little things in life, how are we, how are you, going to survive the big things that life unfortunately has to offer? How will you get through life, if you freak out every time your car breaks down, or you don’t receive a reply, or you don’t know where you placed your keys?

And this is where I thought about the bigger problems. What about the bigger things, the things that drain us entirely. If we aren’t allowed to worry about the things that have solutions, then what about the things that feel like they don’t have solutions?

And this is where Bekims words echoed once more – ‘keep fighting, never give up even if the entire world is against you’. Problems are inevitable, we can’t avoid them, but the more you stress about the little things, the more control life has over you – and when we do face the bigger problems, that’s when life completely consumes us with control.

The first and hardest truth we have to accept is this: life doesn’t stop for anyone. Not for heartbreak, not for grief, not even for the moments that feel massive that it becomes excruciating.

You could lose everything you thought you couldn’t live without – whether it is a person, a dream, a version of yourself that once felt secure – and yet, somewhere, not so far from where you stand breaking apart, a stranger will be falling in love for the very first time, a child will be laughing so hard they can barley breathe, a grocery store will be restocking its shelves with a quiet, ordinary insistence, as if the world hasn’t shifted at all.

It feels cruel sometimes, the way life keeps moving forward, indifferent to whether you are able to move with it, the way hours and days and years continue to spill out across the floor of your life even when you have nothing left inside you to meet them.

Maybe, deep down, a part of us expects, wants, the world to slow down out of respect for our losses. We believe, so heavily within our aching souls, that time should pause, that the noise and the rhythm of daily life should quiet itself long enough to catch your breath and get back up on your feet.

But it doesn’t – and it won’t and never will.

The sun continues to rise on the mornings that feel uninhabitable. The bills must continue to be paid on time, the strangers you pass on the street will continue to have their birthdays, their first kisses and last goodbyes- their lives will continue on, completely unaware that everything inside you have rearranged itself into something sharp and recognizable.

There is no great cosmic stillness reserved for your sorrows, there is only life pulsing and continuing forward, as thoughtlessly as the steady flow of blood through our veins — constant, unrelenting, and purposeful. Even when we’re wounded, even when the heart aches or the mind feels overwhelmed, the blood doesn’t stop its course. It pulses forward, carrying oxygen to every cell, quietly doing its work, regardless of chaos or calm.

And you, battered and broken, are somehow expected to keep moving too. You can try to hold still, to dig your heels into the soil of memory and refuse to be dragged forward, to replay the past again and again until the pain is transformed to feeling holy in familiarity.

You can try to live there, inside everything that’s lost, convincing yourself that if you remain here long enough, life will notice your insistence and circle back to you.

But it won’t.

It will continue to slip past you, faster and faster – as will the entire days and weeks of your life that you don’t even realise are passing until you look back and see the blur, until you get asked ‘what day is it?’ and you are clueless. The longer you stay paralyzed in your pain, the harder it becomes to remember how to step back into the current without drowning.

It is brutal thing to come to terms with and accept, yes, but it is also, somehow, a doorway. Because as much as it hurts to know that life does not stop for our sorrows, it is also the only reason any of us survive it.

If time truly paused for every heartbreak, if the world truly honoured every loss by falling silent and still – we would never get unstuck, we would remain paralysed for eternity. We would never be able to leave the broken places behind us, we would never arrive to the mornings where the weight feels lighter and the laughter comes easier, where hope finally begins to stir again in our chests.

Life’s refusal to stop for our pain is not a punishment – It is the mechanism of our healing.

It doesn’t ask you to be ready, it doesn’t demand for you to be okay – it simply carries you forward, inch by inch, day by day, month by month – year by year. Until one day you wake up and come to realize you are not quite the same person who broke apart all those lifetimes ago. You are something new, unlikely something softer, but something stronger, wiser; someone who is shaped by their losses rather than defined by them.

Resilience isn’t about waiting for life to stop throwing situations your way, life is consistent, it doesn’t stop for anyone. Resilience is about realising that problems don’t get to have ownership over you. You have survived 100% of your life up till now – every breakdown, every bill, every setback, every heartbreak, every inconvenience, every stressful moment – everything you convinced yourself you couldn’t survive, you have survived still. So, what makes you think this is the problem that is going to take you out?

So yes, grieve, fall apart, feel everything – every jagged, searing impossible thing, because what you feel matters and deserve to be honoured. Mourn the version of your life that didn’t survive. Mourn the dreams you had to give up on. Mourn the people who are not coming back. But do not confuse mourning with living – do not build a permanent home in your grief.

Because the truth simply is – the living is still continuing all around you, even when you cannot yet feel it pulsing under your skin. Just as our circulatory system adapts to injury, redirecting flow and healing from within, life, too, finds ways to keep moving. A setback isn’t a full stop; it’s a momentary clot, not a collapse. The body teaches us resilience — that motion continues, that healing is embedded in movement, and that stagnation is not our nature. We are built to endure, to adjust, and most importantly, to keep going.

‘Life goes on’ is not a dismissal of your pain, it is not a careless shrug at the things you have lost, and it is most definitely not a demand to hurry up and heal faster. We are humans, our sole purpose is to feel everything and anything. It is merely a promise that the story is not over, that you are not over. Life continues on because it carries you forward to become someone you have not yet met. And someday, maybe not today or anytime soon, you will meet that version of yourself who realizes you survived something that you had thought would destroy you.

So, when the weight is heavy and your thoughts are complex- what do you do? How do you get over it when you feel as though there is nothing else to do, that there is no solution – what do you do? when you are hurt, broken and burnt out, what can you do?

These are questions that are needed to ask oneself, because there will come and be moments where you will have to find out. You will be at the lowest point in your life, and everything will be against you – what will you do – what CAN you do?

Certain sufferings in our lives will leave when we have learned from them. But only when we have learned from them will they leave. We must take initiative to allow ourselves to try and find the messages in these sufferings, Of course, there will be times where it is going to be difficult, without a doubt. But other times you must find the writing on the wall; you have to be willing to look around and analyse what’s going on in order for you to possibly get away from the suffering that is surrounding you. Instead of expecting the world to pause, instead of living in this pain, you need to learn in order to keep out of suffering. That’s the solution to the problems that are excruciatingly big.

Life goes on, and somehow

So do we.