Rise
The Best Advice I Ever Got
More than 25 years ago, I was leaving the corporate world to start an internet company. Steady paycheck — gone. Security — gone. The plan — barely there.
I was anxious. Overthinking everything. Letting the uncertainty sit on my chest like weather that wouldn’t break.
That’s when a friend told me something I’ve never forgotten.
“Clouds are circumstances. When you rise above them, you get closer to your source of power — the sun. You can see clearly up there.”
He wasn’t telling me to ignore my problems. He was telling me to stop living inside them. The circumstances don’t disappear when you rise above. They’re still there, below you. But you’re not drowning in them anymore. You can see the whole picture. You can breathe. You can think.
I’ve carried that image for 25 years. And I keep coming back to it because it keeps being true.
The Clouds Don’t Go Away
The clouds showed up again in 2018. My mom’s dementia diagnosis. The trip home. The fog that followed me back to California — the one that took my memory for six weeks and scared me more than anything I’d faced on that trip.
They showed up again when both my parents passed, 17 days apart.
They showed up during the seasons when the business felt impossible, when the energy wasn’t there, when I woke up and wondered if I still had the strength I used to have.
The clouds always come back. That’s not the problem. The problem is when you stay in them — when the circumstances become the only thing you can see, and you forget there’s something above them.
What’s Above
The sun doesn’t stop shining because you can’t see it. Whatever your source of power is — faith, family, purpose, the thing that gets you out of bed when nothing else does — it’s still there. The clouds just block the view.
Rising above isn’t about being positive. It’s not about pretending things are fine. It’s about getting enough distance from the noise to see clearly. To hear the answer that was already there before the anxiety drowned it out.
For me, the way up has always been the same. Get quiet. Stop talking about the problem. Start paying attention to what I already have instead of what I’m afraid of losing.
My mom taught me that without using those words. Her rule was simple: if you can’t say something good about someone, don’t say anything at all. It wasn’t a suggestion. It was the law in our house.
At first it felt like discipline — biting my tongue, finding the positive even when I didn’t feel it. But over time it became something else. It trained me to look for the good first. And when I couldn’t find the good, it taught me the second lesson: get quiet and listen.
That’s the way above the clouds. Not force. Not effort. Stillness.
3,500 Feet
It’s no coincidence that I ended up living at 3,500 feet. Mountain Center, California. Above the valley floor. Above the desert heat. Above most of the noise.
Up here, the sky is different. The stars are brighter. The air is thinner and cleaner. On the mornings after a storm, the clouds sit below the ridge line and the sun hits the porch before it hits anything else.
I didn’t move here because of what my friend said 25 years ago. But I stayed here because of it. There’s something about living above the cloud line that reminds you, every single morning, that the circumstances are temporary and the sun is not.
The Way Back
I looked up the word “fortitude” the other day. Not because I didn’t know what it meant, but because I needed to be sure. I needed the definition to match what I was feeling — or maybe what I wasn’t feeling anymore.
Fortitude. The courage and determination to keep going. Inner strength when things get hard.
Then my brain did what it does. It wandered. Forti-tude. What does “tude” even mean?
It’s a suffix. It means state of being.
And once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. Gratitude — the state of being thankful. Attitude — the state of how you see things. Altitude — the state of how high you’ve risen. Fortitude — the state of your strength.
Four states. All connected. All feeding each other.
Gratitude shapes your attitude. Your attitude determines your altitude. Altitude requires fortitude. And fortitude — the strength you build by rising — gives you something to be grateful for.
It works clockwise when you’re building. And when the clouds come back and the cycle breaks — when you wake up wondering if the strength is still there — it works counterclockwise too. You lean into gratitude. You practice the discipline. You get quiet. And slowly, the fortitude rebuilds. Not all at once. But enough to rise again.
The Sun Is Still There
Wherever you are right now — building, rebuilding, or just holding steady — the clouds are not the sky. They’re just what’s between you and the sun.
Rise above them. Get quiet. Look for the good. And trust that your source of power hasn’t gone anywhere.
It’s just waiting for you to get above the weather.
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