When a storm builds on the horizon, every animal in nature retreats slowly in the opposite direction. Every animal except one. This one turns toward the storm and walks straight in. The buffalo.
The buffalo knows something the other animals don't. The best way out of a storm is to walk through the storm.
We all have storms. Not the weather kind. The thing you need to say. The thing you need to end. The thing you need to face. And every time, you turn away.
So you do. You avoid the call. You change the subject. You tell yourself next week is better. When things are calmer. When the moment is right. And the whole time the storm just sits there, waiting, getting no smaller. You are circling it. Watching it. Never walking in.
I understand why. The hard thing is hard. Walking in means sitting in the discomfort, risking the outcome you don't want, feeling the thing you have been avoiding feeling. Of course you circle it. Circling feels safer. But here is what circling actually costs you.
There is a line I come back to often. A problem in your future, once you face it, becomes a problem in your past. While you avoid it, it lives ahead of you. The moment you walk in, it starts moving behind you. It still hurts. The first day is a bad day. But the next hurts a little less, and the one after that, less again. Time only heals the storms you have already walked through. The ones you are still circling never age. They just wait. I learned this the hard way.
I was in a relationship, and I knew there was a conversation I needed to have. I knew it. It was like a gut feeling. But I did nothing. I circled the topic. I let weeks turn into months, telling myself it would pass, that it would sort itself out. It did not. By the time I finally had the guts to do it, the worst version of what I was afraid of landed on me like a bucket of ice water. And the first thing I felt, under the pain, was something stupid and clear. What a waste. If I had been brave enough to walk in at the start, none of this would have grown the way it did.
It did not end well. You can probably guess that.
It was around then that I came across the buffalo analogy. And it clicked in a way nothing had before. I saw exactly what I had been doing. I was not the buffalo. I was every other animal, circling the storm, watching the sky go black, and never once walking in.
So this is the thing I want to leave you with. Whenever you feel one of these on your horizon, the conversation, the truth, the thing you have been putting off, be the buffalo. You will not feel ready. You never do. It will be uncomfortable in exactly the way you are afraid of. Do it anyway, because that is the only way it passes.
So trust yourself, and walk in. After every storm, the sun comes back. And so will you.