Fyodor Dostoevsky stood blindfolded in the snow waiting to be executed. He was 28 years old. He had already watched a priest deliver last rites to the prisoner beside him. He believed, fully and completely, that he had minutes left to live. Then, at the very last moment, a messenger arrived. The Tsar had commuted the sentence to hard labor in Siberia instead. The execution had been staged. A cruel piece of psychological theater. See, the best way to break someone is to make them think that their life is over—before you send them to Siberia.
And somehow, that wasn’t even the hardest part of Dostoevsky’s life. He endured prison camps, poverty, epilepsy, gambling addiction, crushing debt and the deaths of people he loved. At one point, he signed a publishing contract so brutal that if he missed the deadline, he would lose the rights to nearly everything he had ever written. With weeks left, desperate and cornered, he dictated a novel at breakneck speed to a young stenographer named Anna. Later, he married her.
See, sometimes the worst moment of your life is the turning point of your life. Only after years of chaos, suffering, failure and humiliation did he write the books the world would remember forever. Books like Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov.
One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a person is believing their current circumstances are permanent. Twenty-eight-year-old Dostoevsky standing knee-deep in the snow could not possibly have imagined the life still waiting for him. I’m not Dostoevsky, but I remember getting dressed one morning at age 40’ish. Work had grown monotonous. I had just crossed 1,500,000 miles on Delta Air Lines. I asked my wife, “how am I gonna do this over and over for another 25 years?” Spoiler alert #1: I didn’t. Most of us can easily recognize this pattern in other people’s lives while struggling to see it in our own. We understand instinctively that a great protagonist suffers in the middle of the story. We just panic when it’s happening to us.
Most of us can’t imagine our future selves. Which is probably why so many people just give up. Often, we look at a situation and think, “I just can’t see any possible way out of this.” As if you’re knee-deep in snow, waiting for the bullet. Spoiler alert #2: you aren’t. Human beings are uniquely bad at understanding time, particularly when they are struggling. One bad month feels like the beginning of the rest of your life. A lonely season feels permanent. Failure feels inevitable. Guilt feels overwhelming. Grief feels suffocating. When you are knee-deep in the snow waiting on a bullet, it becomes very difficult to see a way out. To imagine that you still have more chapters to write.
But almost everyone who has lived long enough has experienced this strange reversal: you look back on a season that once felt overwhelming and realize that if you had given up there, you never would have reached the best parts of your life. I’ve had moments like that more than once. Maybe you have too. The older I get, the more I think hope is less about optimism and more about humility. It’s the quiet acknowledgment that maybe you are not the best judge of what your life will become. Maybe the future is wider than your current field of vision. Maybe this chapter is not the ending you think it is. At the lowest point in your life, if someone had shown you how the story ends, you wouldn’t have believed them. Things almost always turn out better than we expect, no matter the circumstances.
Dostoevsky went on to write: “Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute could have been an age of happiness.” Not exactly the words of a fatalist. The words of someone who stared directly into the abyss and still concluded that life was worth living and loving. See, the greatest novels ever written were inside of him all along. Even at the lowest point of his life. They were always in there, patiently waiting to come out.
A man once stood blindfolded in the snow believing his life was over. The world remembers him because it wasn’t. Keep going, my friend. It’s not over yet. You, too, have many more chapters to write.
