It’s
a Wild Ride
“Just
because things hadn’t gone the way I had planned didn’t necessarily mean they
had gone wrong.”
Ann
Pachett (What Now?)
One of
the things the isolation of the pandemic has given us is time to think. To
think back on our lives, if you’re my age, and to think forward and plan if you’re
young. When you’re young, or at least when I was young, you’re always thinking
in future terms—where you want to be ten years from now, what you’ll be doing,
where you’ll be living, who you’ll be loving. When you get to my age, it’s in
reverse—where you’ve been, what you did, who you were with. It’s all good, but
neither is right.
Looking
forward, we cannot possibly see all the unexpected twists and turns that life
will plunk down in our path without our permission—like a pandemic, for
instance. I had a friend in my first counselling practice who was a young unwed
mother of a little girl child. She stood out in the practice because she didn’t
have the cash for a professional wardrobe, so she dressed a little “hippy.” She
seemed always to be just hanging on by a thread. She left the practice to go to
work for the local crisis center so that she would have a predictable income. I
lost track of her for a while and then she popped up on my Facebook page. She
is now an international trainer in forensic interviewing and child advocacy. I’m
pretty sure that when I knew her, she had no notion of herself as such—life took
her there and she just put one foot in front of the other.
It’s easy,
looking forward, to have plans that become expectations; they solidify in our
minds without our realizing that all the plans in the world do not account for
movement of Spirit, or even the changing of circumstances. Life is never
static, though we want it to be so that we can exercise a modicum of control
over it. We go through good times and tough times, and just plain disastrous times.
It’s only in retrospect that we can see a pattern. Here is how Ann Patchett describes it in her autobiography, What Now?
“Coming
back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are
connected, how one decision leads you to another, how one twist of fate, good
or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by
several detours—long hallways and unforeseen stairwells—eventually puts you in
the place you are now.”
When we
look back, we still sometimes get a blurry picture, because we overlay it with
what we know now. We apply the wisdom gained, and the wounds acquired, and the
redirection implemented to the actual events so that none of it is a pure rendering.
The truth is that almost nothing of what happens to us as we journey through
this earth school is a result of planning—and that is as it should be. It allows
room for us to fail and learn, to succeed and move through, to achieve what we
could not have dreamed, and to end up where we are with nothing but gratitude
and awe. Just enjoy the journey. Have a wild ride. It will get you where you’re
going and where you need to be.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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