I heard Laird Hamilton say something on a podcast earlier today that stuck with me: “One thing changes and everything changes.”
Laird is a legendary big-wave surfer, athlete and entrepreneur, someone who has built a life and career around pushing limits most of us wouldn’t get anywhere near. He was talking about his life, where he came from, the challenges he faced and the hardships along the way. Given the opportunity to go back and change any of it, he wouldn’t. Why?
One thing changes and everything changes.
I’ve been thinking about that all day. Most of us have chapters we would have written differently. The failure we could have done without. The relationship that fell apart. The business decision that cost us. The season when money was tight. The door that closed. The opportunity we missed. The years that felt harder than they needed to be.
There are decisions we wish we could take back and circumstances we would have avoided altogether. If someone handed us a red pen and let us edit our story, I wonder how quickly we would start crossing things out. Delete that year. Change that decision. Avoid that person. Skip that failure. Take the other opportunity.
The problem with that? We have no idea what else disappears when we start editing.
One thing changes and everything changes.
That’s the part I keep coming back to. We want to keep the person we’ve become while removing some of what it took to become that person. I’m not sure it works that way.
The resilience I have today was built during seasons I hated going through. The compassion I have for someone else struggling exists because I’ve struggled too. The wisdom I bring into a room was purchased through mistakes I’d never want to repeat. The courage I have now traces directly back to moments when I was scared out of my mind and had to move forward anyway. Even some of the relationships I treasure most today exist because of circumstances I never would have chosen.
Pull one thread and who knows what else starts to unravel.
There’s an interesting thing about scars. We usually think of them as evidence that something went wrong. But maybe they’re also evidence that something healed. They remind us there was pain, certainly, but they also remind us the pain didn’t get the final word.
But erase my own scars? Not a chance. I like what they produced.
One thing changes and everything changes.
Maybe part of maturity is learning to look backward and stop arguing with our story. Not celebrating every painful thing that happened or pretending every mistake was somehow the right decision. Just recognizing that somehow, through all of it, it’s shaping you.
The mountaintops shaped you, but so did the valleys. The wins shaped you, but so did getting your teeth kicked in. The people who believed in you shaped you, and in strange ways, so did the people who didn’t. The answered prayers shaped you. Maybe some of the unanswered ones did even more.
We’ll never know what the alternate version of our lives would have looked like. We only get this one, and when we accept that, we find freedom. That’s what I appreciate about Hamilton’s perspective. He isn’t looking backward wishing for an easier road. He recognizes that the road is part of the man.
I want to be able to do the same.
