There’s Always Next Year
I am a planner. I like looking ahead at calendars, I like a schedule, and I like setting goals for myself. And even though I can control many things in my life, like everyone else, I can’t control everything. There are significant moments in my life when I’ve had to make lemonade out of lemons at the last minute. I once had an entire trip planned to Belize and Guatemala but two days before I was scheduled to leave a hurricane was headed for Belize. I ended up taking a fantastic trip to Costa Rica instead. The trip was planned on the way down instead of weeks in advance, but everything came together and worked out. Of course there are situations, like the loss of a loved one, where we can’t find a second best option. In those moments we need to feel our pain over the loss.
What happens when you have the grandest plans and then, for whatever reason, things don’t work out? If I had to guess most people will try their hardest to make the thing they were planning for still happen. We don’t want to accept defeat. We want to keep moving forward. I fully support spending time thinking outside the box and still going after what it is that you want. But then what? Sometimes people will push themselves and a situation to the absolute max and then get hurt because they kept pushing. Eventually reality will settle in and then we need to allow ourselves time to scream, cry, grieve, and have all the feelings we’re going to have. Once we’ve let it all out, we can reframe the situation and find a solution. It might not be as good as our original plan, but it could also end up being better. There won’t really be a way of knowing. What we can know is that we did the best we could. Whatever the situation was it served as a reminder that we don’t always have complete control over how we want things to be. It’s still important to plan and set those goals but it’s also an important life lesson to recognize that we can’t always get what we want. We can adapt and still be happy even when we’re taking on a different path.
