Lesson One: You Get To Choose Some of the Journey, But Not All of It.
As with many of us, life has thrown me some unexpected and unimagined (if not heretofore unimaginable) turns in the past number of years, starting most precipitously with the financial melt-down of 2008). As an inveterate planner (and Enneagram Six), like you may be, we plan on and for good things as much as we can (how much is another story altogether), but inevitably as the cliche goes “the best laid plans of mice and wo(men)….”
When the painful disruptive situations and events happen – be they internal or external – I find myself thinking or feeling “This wasn’t supposed to happen, this is NOT what I planned.”
And then I mourn.
But what if we simply accepted that we don’t get to plan those things that seem to be the most soul-stretching, the spaces and places where transformation suddenly pops our defined sense of self, the “who we are”, out of the shell in which we have become comfortable and maybe even complacent.
Surrendering to the unexpected, which includes embracing the bitter and the sweet, the challenge and the reward, the dark and the light, the fogginess of confusion along with the light of clarity, the sadness and the joy, the closing door while awaiting the opening of a new door…this is the heart of the matter. for it’s where our life lessons make themselves known. Of course, it takes emotional discipline to not get stuck in the emotions that arise – be that fear, worry, anxiety, or anger.
The less we resist and fight whatever shows up, the quicker our possibility to transform.
