One of the social and emotional activities we do with our students is called an emotional timeline. In this activity, kids reflect on their lives and think of the moments that were really good and those that were really difficult. They will list events such as birthdays, vacations, meeting friends, or learning to play a sport. They also list things such as the death of a family member, moving from an old home, parents divorcing, or other tragic events.

The purpose of this lesson can be surface-level, such as just remembering that in your low times, there will be high times ahead… bla bla bla. However, in my opinion, the meat of an exercise such as this is digging into your lows. Not because I like to wallow in what went wrong, but rather because all of our shaping comes from the moments we felt broken.

Reflecting on past hurts or tragedies requires moving back the curtains and operating from a place of understanding. We can’t just focus on the faces of those who wronged us or the injustices in the world. We can’t shovel dirt onto mounds of victimhood. We must go back to that moment and choose to look around.

What are the faces of the people who were there for you? What did you discover about your own strengths and endurance? What did you learn about human behavior and what could be done differently in a similar situation? What may have been the perspective of others in this situation? What were you able to control in that moment and what did you or could you have controlled to make that situation more bearable?

Humans can be so smart and so damn stupid at the same time. We look back to package our memories into when we were right and others were wrong. We look back to package people who have crossed our path into good, bad, and forgettable. We look back to justify why we are not seeing what we want to see when we look forward.

I suggest we look back to learn that we are capable of forgiveness and understanding. We look back to assess our ability to reach out for help, so we can grow our ability to be vulnerable during difficult times. We look back to learn that, as mentioned earlier, we are strong enough to hold on until good times come back around again.

What does your timeline look like? What have you learned in your darkest moments? Adults have an advantage so much greater than children, as we have stumbled and failed far more than they have. This means we have a bank of lessons accumulated, from the actions we took to avoid pain that didn’t work to the actions we took to overcome pain that made all the difference in our world.

Adults also have the ability to look back on the same event a hundred times or more. As you mature and gain new experiences, all of a sudden, the old hurts may look a little different. Some of you may look back differently on your parents now that you are parents. Some of you may look back different on moments of hurt to see others who were also impacted and the pain they must have felt. Suddenly you see humanity, for all of its glory and flaws, in moments where at the time you were too consumed with emotion to understand.

We always use our backpack of memories to pull out the glasses with which we choose to see the world in its present state. Your life is filled with highs and lows. The highs are great at bringing us bursts of gratitude and happiness, but trust that it is in our lows we find out what we are made of, who we need around us, and what we are capable of when those future struggles most definitely come to meet us again. Use your timeline to serve you and your future, because learning from our past will give us the keys to the freedom we seek in our future.