That’s life: Taking charge after life throws you off balance

STRANGERS ARE HUGGING and wishing each other a hearty happy new year against the backdrop of flashing fireworks. I want to freeze the optimism, hope and anticipation on the faces around me.

To capture it in a bubble for myself so that in coming days, I can take a whiff of it every so often and relive the feeling.

Why? Because as we sit to take stock of the old year, and welcome the new one with resolutions, goals and wish-lists, one thing is certain. In all our planning, we must leave room for the unexpected.

For our best laid plans to occasionally go awry but then, we must face those unsettling moments with optimism and faith rather than dread. For this too is life.

Financial planners do it all the time. They leave wiggle room for contingencies or make provisions for disruptions like price fluctuations.

They accept that the unexpected can happen and make a plan for it. Yet even with all this, life can and often does throw us unexpected curve balls that we could never have anticipated in our wildest dreams.

BEST LAID PLANS

On a smaller scale our best laid plans can be disrupted by traffic jams, interruptions to our work day, a fight with a loved one or a health scare.

On a bigger level, our best laid plans are disrupted by the death of a loved one, divorce, a job layoff, market shifts that have us rethinking our business case, health challenges that make it difficult for us to perform previous routine tasks, or a life threatening diagnosis.

We respond to these changes in myriad of ways. We may go through denial and even anger at those we hold responsible for the new order.

Yet insanity is insisting that nothing has changed and maintaining our old way of doing things when everything is no longer as it was.

A much healthier way is to recognise and understand the changes, and what they portend for us. We then need to mourn the loss of our best laid plans and accept life, not as we want it to be but as it is now. This season is about accepting our new ‘normal’. As we do this, we are finally ready to see the new opportunities that are about to present themselves.

That’s where we need a healthy dose of optimism and faith or else we will be blinded to the opportunities of our new normal.

However, if this was as easy as I am making it sound, more people would be embracing it. Truth is, it is a difficult process that requires mental fortitude, mind shifts, patience and compassion for ourselves and others.

If we fail to make the changes, we may sink into depression at worst or a pre-occupation with “the good ol’ days” at best.

This is because we believe that our past was better than our present. That may even be the case. However, the past is no longer an option, so why live in it?

You see it when a breadwinner loses a job and instead of re-adjusting his family life to reflect his current financial situation, goes into debt by refusing to downsize his living.

We know of people who are diagnosed with a health condition but refuse to take medication because they are in denial. In their own ways, each of them wants to live like nothing has changed.

One episode of Desperate Housewives always drives the point home for me, if a little morbidly.

In it, an old woman whose husband had gone missing for many years or so she told neighbours, is found dead and preserved in her freezer.

After interrogation, the authorities determine that her husband died one evening, and rather than face the prospect of life alone, she opted to keep him close, where she could talk to him daily. 

What none of us wanted to believe, at least not on New Year’s eve, was that every year is a mixed bag. We live in hope that it will hold more goodies than baddies for us.

We live in hope that with determination and hard work, we will get to achieve most of our aspirations. We live in hope that our best laid plans will succeed.

But in those moments when they don’t, we must not lose the hope that we can still prevail in spite of it.