Well, that’s life…
In this upcoming year, my personal resolution is to not fight life. Instead, I’m teaming up with life and seeing where it takes me.
I know it’s a weird resolution, but I have come to the conclusion that my eternal cycle of exhaustion and anxiety must be broken, and that this resolution is the way to do it.
No longer will I challenge the inevitable, or try to swim against the tide. Instead I will choose to trust that everything will work out as it should if I just do my best and then let it all go.
For the first seven years of my life, I grew up in an area pretty similar to Newbury Park, a close knit community, where I went to a K-8 school. I was going to graduate with the kids I had gone to kindergarten with. Well, at least that was the plan, but this was my first experience realizing that life does not always go as planned.
At the ripe old age of 7 years old, I discovered I was moving to Sydney, Australia, and although there was absolutely nothing I could do, I tried with all my heart to delay my family’s move. However try as I might, life kept rolling on and despite my best efforts, that coming February, my room was packed, my goodbyes were said, and off I went Down Under.
Going into this experience, I was angry: How dare my life plans be ruined and I frequently asked the dramatic question “Why me?!?!” But as I continued, with my family by my side, I embarked on the greatest adventure of my life. I got the opportunity to be exposed to a whole new culture and explore a completely different hemisphere.
After spending four brilliant years in Australia, I left with not only an accent, but a whole new perspective on the world and a heart full of gratitude for the wonderful life we have here in the United States, full of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, free drink refills and a great school system. The move I had dreaded and fought against turned out to be one of the best experiences of my life.
That experience should have taught me the lesson that sometimes, life pushes us in what feels like the wrong direction for actually the right reasons, and things just might work out better than we could ever have imagined. Unfortunately, it didn’t. Here I am over four years later, still battling against the world and what is in store for me. Still thinking I know just how my life is supposed to go and stomping my feet when it doesn’t go my way.
Still trying to make a boy “relationship material” even though he obviously isn’t, still giving all my effort to things that just don’t pay off, just because that’s the way I planned it so it MUST happen.
So often in today’s society we find ourselves absorbed by insanely advanced planning. Five year plans… ten year plans… we all act like we know how our lives are going to be, myself in particular. I will always plan aheadーit’s part of who I amーbut my resolution is meant to help me accept the fact that sometimes, life doesn’t go according to our plans.
This New Year, my social media was littered with posts about how terrible 2016 was, but in reality, it’s not the year that was terrible, it was our reaction to it. So in 2017 join me in a year full of going with the flow and taking what life hands out with a smile- because let’s be real, we can’t stop the world from throwing us curveballs, but we can learn to hit one and choose to embrace what we’re given and make it a homerun.
Of course I’m still going to have my five year plan and my ten year plan and whatnot, but I’m also going to remind myself that my plans are tentative and easily subject to change because, well, that’s life.
