Heading Downstream
Accepting what life gives you and making the best of your situation
In my early twenties, I had life all figured out.
I had all of the answers and knew everything.
With a wife and three children from her previous relationship, there were more at stake than just my life and happiness now. I was suddenly responsible for other people.
Living under the thought processes from my childhood that you can “accomplish anything you set your mind to” and that “you can be anything you want to be”, I thought that through hard work and fighting life’s struggles, I could will anything into fruition. That it was a weakness to give up or that how someone responded to adversity was someway indicative of his or her character.
The funny thing about character is that it is not tangible.
It is something that changes every time you speak to someone about another person or yourself.
It can be biased.
It is imagined and typically far from the truth.
It wasn’t until I could see the end of my marriage coming that I was honest with myself. I didn’t really know anything. I didn’t have any of the answers.
It was then that I decided to let go. I decided I did not want to fight anymore.
My marriage was just like any other relationship. We had our really good times and really bad times to balance it out. In a number of instances, we had fought to save the relationship.
This last instance felt different.
For the first time, I started to question the thought processes that I had always just accepted as fact. There had to be a better way; life should not be such a struggle. It also did not make sense to me that those processes to live by could apply to everyone. People are so unique that everyone should have to find their own way. So, for the first time, I started to ask myself some key questions about these beliefs.
What am I fighting for? Isn’t insanity along those same lines, expecting a different result from repeatedly doing the same thing? How does that not apply to me trying to save this relationship?
I finally realized there really wasn’t a difference between the two. So there was a choice to make, either keep fighting or accept the truth of the situation. I woke up and decided I could not fight the reality of my situation. It was not because I was not strong enough, or committed enough, or brave enough. In fact, to me, allowing myself to move into the unknown was much braver.
I finally felt free.
Following the divorce, I had another major decision to make. I did not want to live where I was anymore. I owed it to myself to have a fresh start. I could move back closer to my family and friends, and lean on my support system, or I could venture to a new place with no ties and rely on myself. Oddly enough, the unknown did not scare me at all. But the vital piece was that I did not want to make the decision; I had been making all the decisions that got me into the predicament that I now found myself.
In the past, I would have chosen to move back to my family, to the comfort of my support system. After reevaluating my previous decision-making process, I felt it was the time to try something different, to take a new path. It was time to let go of the wheel. I did not want to force life to be how I envisioned it be; rather, I wanted to accept things for what they were and focus on the new opportunities it was providing me.
The unfamiliar path enabled me to lean on my strengths, like being able to find positives even when things look bleak. Highlighting those strengths is where success comes from.
I do have general goals and things I want to accomplish. The difference now is that I allow those to be fluid. There is no need to fight since you, no matter how much time you dedicate towards it, can’t possibly account for every variable in every decision you make. I thought I could, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Life is extremely short and I no longer saw the benefit of being miserable or struggling. I want to find happiness and cherish every day that I have. That applies to all aspects of life. If I am not happy in a relationship, I’ll fight until it longer becomes tolerable and then I’ll accept that. In my work experience, if I am not happy then it is time to look for something different.
I am now more open to trying new things, taking more adventures, coming out of my comfort zone. There is no way to control everything in life, so I stopped trying. It has taken eight years and I’ve realized that this is much more sustainable approach than I ever imagined.
This does not mean to not try by any means. It means being honest with yourself and focusing on what is and is not controllable. If I cannot control something, I can still control to what degree it impacts my life and whether or not it gets to determine my happiness. And luckily for me, at the end of the day I get to determine my own happiness regardless of how anyone else views it.
