The featured photo, of the sailing yacht, recently appeared in my Facebook memories notification. I had captured a memorable moment shared with my life partner – a marriage that now no longer is.
When we experience a major shift in a relationship due to divorce, death, distance or disconnection – or a change with our health, work environment or home location – there will always be physical, emotional and mindful adjustments to be made. It requires letting go the attachment to ‘what was’ to now accept ‘what is’. And, as hard as this has been, I’ve learned there’s no avoiding it, to be able to move forward in life.
A helpful NLP tool I often use is the reframing technique; viewing the situation with an expanded perspective and seeing possibilities, not only perplexities. I could not control what was happening in my outer world, when personally facing all the situations mentioned above, but I always have control of how I respond to unexpected life events.
Experiencing the unravelling of what had represented security to me with my relationships, career and wellbeing exposed the scared, vulnerable and ‘messy’ parts of who I was. To discover I was also capable of being brave, resilient and whole allowed me to embrace the personal growth that accompanies a newly navigated journey.
I’ve learned to do a lot of dancing in the rain.
We are all impacted by the current unprecedented global turmoil. Life, as our known normal, has been halted at a major road block on the journey – Covid19 – with everyone’s navigation apps now scrambling to reroute an alternative direction to arrive at the desired destination. For many people, the planned destination of where their life journey was heading may no longer be an option.
The new normal will likely feel uncomfortable and undesirable. But there will always be something each day to be grateful for. This was one of the most significant realities of life I learned, when journeying through grief and uncertainty. Our life story may have just had the plot line edited but we still get to personally write the concluding chapters.
In a year’s time our facebook posts will be re appearing as memories. We all get to choose how we want to reflect on this season of our life. In fact, we get to choose how we respond to it, today and tomorrow, also.
“The one law that does not change is that everything changes and the hardship I was bearing today was only a breath away from the pleasures I would have tomorrow, and those pleasures would be all the richer because of the memories of this I was enduring.” –Louis L’Amour