Expectations hold you back

The following is good advice for anyone going through crisis...

We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. -Joseph Campbell

This is an important lesson. In life, there is no telling what will happen in the next 5 minutes much less tomorrow, or a week/month/year from now. We all know that, but we fall into routines that lead us to believe that the future is predictable. And when we think that way, we begin to plan our futures out years, sometimes decades in advance. Then one day we get blindsided by something unexpected and it threatens those plans that we've made.

It could be a spouse's illness that eclipses your lifelong dream of all that you'd do when you retired together. Or, it could come much earlier when your spouse hands you divorce papers unexpectedly and the dream of raising a family together has to be given up because one of you has changed their mind. And life changing events happen outside of relationships too, of course. It can even be a positive change like winning the lottery that leads to plan changes -good or bad. We've all heard stories of the demise of lottery winners.

How many times have you muttered the words "you never know what tomorrow might bring", but do you actually live that way? The majority of us go to work each day dreaming of the weekend, the next vacation, retirement. But, there's no guarantee that the weekend will come or that you'll be able to enjoy it. The frustrating part is that we often can't really "live each day as if it were our last" because the reality is that we must work for the money to provide both our basic needs, our comforts, recreation, etc.

So what do we do? Well, finding work that you love would be the ideal, but I'm still working on this. In the meantime the plan is not to plan too far ahead; make the best out your free time and when adversity comes along, accept it. In fact, plan on it. The alternative makes us blind to reality and causes us to miss things while we sort out where our plan went wrong -while we ponder "why me?"

An example -The other day on my way to work traffic was much worse than usual. We all crept along until we saw the flashing lights ahead and everyone in the left lane knew they had to merge right to get around the mess ahead. I put on my turn signal and looked in the rearview mirror in preparation to merge and saw the guy in the right lane (behind me) speed up to block my way. I was close to the end of my lane, so I had to continue slowly edging into the lane, forcing him to slow down or get hit. When I got into the right lane I looked behind me and saw the man punch his dashboard and shake his fist, screaming at me and (I assume) the traffic, the fact that he was going to be late for work, etc. -Then we passed the accident. I looked over at a gurney in the ambulance, a sheet drapped over the person inside. The firefighters, the ambulance crew, the police -no one was rushing. A car was bent all out of shape nearby. I looked back at the man, still glaring at me, still steaming because he was going to be late for work and I cost him one more car length. How could one miss how small a problem the traffic is in comparison to someone who just died 20 feet away from you?

Dwelling on the loss of your plan, and mourning the loss of the life you expected just wastes time. You have to deal with it. Figure out what your options are, make the best of what you got, and move on. It's the only answer. Ask someone who's been through real adversity (Christopher Reeve, Aron Ralston, Lance Armstrong) and they'll tell you the same thing. Whether it's a minor inconvenience like traffic, or a major life change like illness or divorce, you need to accept the reality that life can and will change on a dime, then you just have to move on.