Life can throw some nasty curve balls. One moment we can ride on cloud 9 and have total certainty that everything is going our way and then a sneak attack happens and we’re knocked down.
This is one guarantee we are certain to have – “life happens when we least expect it.” Anyone breathing, living and striving to be more than this body will inevitably get knocked down and it’s not the fact that you got knocked down, it’s a matter of getting back up.
The ideas we have about ourselves must be bigger than us – this is the only way we will get up and keep going. There must be a reserve of strength within us that rises to the top when life gets hard and when trials rush into our lives disrupting the norm. It is in these moments, hours, weeks or years that we are tested and given the opportunity to know how strong we really are.
Two years ago, my 3 children and I lived a shelter for women fleeing domestic abuse. For the first time in my life I was homeless, but I made the decision to rise above the confusion and fear so we could adjust to the changes. For some mother’s and others who lived in the shelter, the transition from leaving their partner, having a home to being homeless was extremely stressful. Some sank into apathy and some into a state of confusion. The norm was no longer normal.
Any major life changes can drastically affect one’s life and cause one to become angry, confused, depressed, anxious or fearful. One can stand still and do absolutely nothing because they’re not sure of what they should do in their new found situation. These are normal responses to a major upset in life. It’s not easy to leave or change routines, but there is a way to handle it.
I had left a 13 year relationship. As you know, in any relationship, norms are established and after 13 years, we certainly had a routine, but when I finally made the decision to leave – the norm was broken. As I walked through the doors of the shelter in the middle of night with my 3 children, I immediately took action to create some routines that my children could rely on. I made the decision to keep them enrolled a their school (even though we’d spend hours traveling to and from).
This made all the difference in picking up the pieces of our lives and helped us create a new norm. This is not to say that I didn’t experience fear or anger – I certainly did! I was scared because I had never experienced this situation before and I knew this type of experience was a “make-or-break” situation. I knew that if I didn’t get my sh^t together, my children would absolutely feel devastating affects.
This is the secret I discovered to overcoming fear, confusion or anxiety when the norm is broken: find one piece of stable information that you can hold onto. It can be anything like getting up at 5 AM everyday or going for a walk on the same path. Anything that you can hold in place that will not change (until you change it).
My stable piece of information was keeping my kids at the same school. Once I established this as being our truth, everything else started to align and a lot of the ups and downs we could have experienced were bypassed.
This information can be applied to major life changes, a new position on the job or moving to a new town. Anytime we experience changes, we can have control and find stability.
Your future is yours for creating.
Intentional Living 