When Things Don’t Go As Planned
I just got off the phone with my best friend, our second chat of the day, a rarity. I’ve come to expect her call mid-morning as she’s walking with her daughter. It’s usually what marks my transition from writer to nanny. But tonight, our unexpected conversation was all about what happens when things don’t turn out like we planned.
We’re a lot alike, she and I. We’re dedicated, loyal, and most of all chronically optimistic. So when we’re faced with a fork in the road, the ending of one chapter for another, we typically take a deep breath, pull up our big girl panties, and deal.
We’ve dealt with a lot of life in the nine years we’ve been friends. I guess that’s how your twenties are supposed to go. Everything happens so fast in an attempt to set you up the rest of your life. But a decade doesn’t seem like fair enough a time for that sort of thing. You transition from kid to functioning adult, and suddenly you’re just supposed to know how to do everything. Every choice, every decision suddenly carries so much weight.
Our conversation was pretty serious tonight, the end of something big. When you’re a kid and someone doesn’t keep their promise, your feelings get hurt. When you’re an adult and someone doesn’t keep their promise, lives get ripped to shreds.
So when something ends; when something you were counting on doesn’t work out. When your life doesn’t go as planned, you have two choices. You can curl into yourself, dwelling on it, constantly feeling the loss. Or you can take a step back, evaluate, see where things might have gone wrong, and adjust your sails.
Easier said than done, my friends. I know this. But I guess that’s all part of being an adult, too. When we fall and scrape our knees, there’s no one waiting with a bandaid and a shoulder to cry on. You have to pick yourself up and tell yourself you’ll be fine.
The fact is, sometimes the only way to learn a lesson is to learn it the hard way. To let the hurt in. It’s just a normal day. A regular Tuesday. We all go about our lives, week by week. But you never know when something will end. It comes at you out of the blue. Life was normal, and within one split second, one decision changes everything as you know it.
That’s the hardest part about being an adult for me, I think. Is knowing everything we do is collected into a series of choices that pave out our lives.
