Embrace The Unexpected

I think almost all of us know what it's like to have our life planned out, and then watch as most of it, if not all of it falls apart right before our eyes. Or even if our life has gone mostly as planned, there's always at least a few things that haven't panned out leaving us putting "Plan B" into action. Either way, for most people life doesn't always go the way we think it will even when we put all our energy into plans for the future and expect it to play out exactly the way we intend. Even then, sometimes life likes to take us in a different direction. This can be frustrating at best... we want to make the plans, we want to know they'll work out, and we want them to be in our control. And why shouldn't we? After all this is our life.

Although... if you're like me, and have lived long enough, you've probably noticed as you look back that some of your decisions, or plans for the future, might not have been the wisest choices. So perhaps life, while looking like it doesn't care about us... may even hate us... might actually be re-directing us. And this may be the best thing to happen, even if it did turn everything upside down for a time, it may be leaving us on a path (as scary and uncertain as it may seem) that is better suited for us. 

In the last ten years, my life was turned upside down more than once.... I went from being diagnosed with cancer, to leaving an unhealthy church, to recovering from a car wreck, to going through a divorce. Just as I was recovering from one devastation, another one hit. Some of it was side effects from choices I had made long ago, and some of it was just bad luck and completely out of my control. Either way, I was in constant shock as I watched everything spin out of control and had no way of fixing it. All I could do is try to stay calm and listen to my intuition as it guided me through. 

I'm in a much better place now, and as horrific as it all was, I did learn a few things...  first of all, really nothing is in our control so there's no use trying to control it, and two, if we just let go and let our inner guide lead the way, we'll find ourselves in a much better place. So now I'm focusing on not needing to control things. This is hard for me, especially since, first of all, I'm a planner, and, second, I feel really anxious when things feel out of my control. However, when I relax, take it a day at a time, and go with the flow, life becomes clear, and things tend to work out. Not only am I able to focus on the present, which helps me make better decisions in the moment, but I'm better able to follow my inner compass as it guides me in the right direction. This takes patience (which I'm not great at) and learning to live with uncertainty (which is scary) but the more I practice this, the easier it gets, and the more I see progress. Also, and I never thought I'd say this, but it's kind of fun not knowing everything. Instead of feeling like I'm walking through the dark, waiting for something terrifying to jump out at me, I now feel like I'm being taken by the hand and guided in the direction where there's good surprises on the horizon.

So, the next time life throws a curve in the road, instead of thinking of it as the end of the road, think of it as a shift in the road... something turning you in the direction you need to go in order to find the life that's waiting for you and Embrace It...