As spring becomes more well established in 2025 and gives way to summer, my mind begins to think about two things: worry and wisdom.
I think about why we worry and the shared wisdom of the past that helps us cope with the uncertainty of our future.
I have written in past columns about the wisdom my mother and grandmother taught me. My grandmother taught me, “What cannot be cured must be endured.”
As you may or may not recall from my past columns, she would share this with me when life got heavy, when illness came, or money was tight, or when the world simply refused to bend. She didn’t tell me this with defeat in her voice. She said it like someone who had stood in the storm and made peace with the rain. Not because she liked hardship, but because she understood something deeper: that some things in life simply are more difficult, and our work isn’t always to try to fix them, but to live through them with grace.
At the time, I didn’t realize how her words would shape me. Somehow, I knew they had weight — the kind of weight that doesn’t slow you down but anchors you.
My mother had her own way of passing out that strength. I shared one of her favorite sayings in a past column. Whenever I said, “I wish,” she’d gently reply, “If wishes were horses beggars would ride.
It used to frustrate me. I thought she was brushing me off. But now I hear it differently. She wasn’t saying don’t dream — she was reminding me to keep my feet on the ground while I looked to the sky.
These nuggets of wisdom were meant, I realize now, not to be clever or poetic. They were lived, worn, smoothed by use. They offered me tools for living. Not just words, but something to hold onto when things in my world didn’t make sense anymore.
As I now move through my own seasons of life, I have come to see these phrases for what they really are. They are not just attempts to downplay my wishes or thoughts, but they were signposts of something much bigger, a thread connecting us to the souls who came before us.
I believe — more and more — that we are not just here in the world. We are witnesses to the world as it is. That the soul is not some separate thing hidden away waiting to be discovered. The soul is the one thing that stays steady when everything is changing.
When my grandmother said, “what cannot be cured must be endured,” she was telling me I need to toughen up. She was teaching me how to be. How to remain present. How to let life happen through me without the need to control every twist and turn of it.
And when my mother reminded me that wishing alone wouldn’t carry me forward, she was pointing me back to the quiet work of doing, of showing up even when it's imperfect or messy or slow or discouraging.
I carry their words with me still. Not just as memories, but as ways of living. Reminding me that worry really is futile. Sometimes, when I am trying to offer comfort to another sojourner, I hear their voices come through mine — soft, steady and unshakable. A reminder that life can’t always be solved and that’s not the intent of life anyway. Life is not so much a problem to be solved as it is an experience to be shared.
And maybe the point was never to solve it at all anyway. Maybe, the point is we all can do one thing — love ourselves and others in life. It's probably the most powerful thing we can do. To love ourselves and others through it.
Someone who reads my column told me, “you have had some strong capable women in your life.”
They were correct. I did.
I love and miss you mom and grandma, and I won’t forget your words.
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Richard Stride is the current CEO of Cascade Community Healthcare.
