Starting Over...Again

The older I get, the more I realize life never was a straight route from Point A to Point B. We would all love to think it worked that way; everything nice and neat, but it’s messy, convoluted and often navigated by the skin of one’s teeth. Growing up, the expected road map for my life was graduate high school, earn a degree, get a job, get married, have kids, grow old together after having done everything right. Cue happily ever after and the Norman Rockwell family.rnThe reality? Not so much (except for the part where I raise two incredibly awesome kids). Having gone through more of them then I really ever wanted, I’ve come to the conclusion that life really is just a bunch of “This Is Done, Start Again” moments. In the blink of an eye, everything we think we know can change, often at the worst possible moment. The honest truth is that things and people come and in and out of our lives on a tide we really don’t fully control. Homes, friends, partners, jobs, and even the direction of your life can and will change, often when you least expect it. I’ve always been curious about people who make 5 or 10-year plans for their lives. They carefully plot out where they’ll work, where they’ll live, who’ll they’ll marry, size of their family….the works. Don’t get me wrong, I really admire clear-sightedness and the ability to set goals, but rigid plans just can’t stand up to what life can dish out. Anything can happen at any time, from ‘it can’t happen here’ moments like 9/11, to betrayals by those you trust most, to global recessions, to sudden deaths, to a car engine seizing out of the blue. I’m not so jaded that I think life is one disaster followed by another. It is more of a collection of moments; some off-the-wall amazing, some quietly everyday, and some soul-crushingly awful. No one type of moment wipes out another, but instead, they somehow balance each other out to create a sort of crazy patchwork quilt; worn in places, angel-soft in others. While most of us grew up thinking our lives will consist of us doing this and then this and then this, there comes a time where you have to admit that flexibility and the willingness to continually start over, sometimes from nothing, is what gets you through life.rnNo iron-clad plan can do that. blessings, Catie Copyright 2013 WomanLinks.comrn