Blog #766: What Do I Do NOW?

Part of his email read:

“The job I thought was the ‘one’ turned out to be a big lie. I’m getting tired of getting my hopes up and being let down.”

That’s a feeling I know well.

______

In high school…

I thought I would be a professional golfer.
At Berkeley, I wanted to be Student Body President.
In my twenties, I wanted to go into politics.
In my thirties, I dreamed of opening a chain of career colleges.

Four dreams I knew I could live.

None became me.

BUT…

By still showing up after my defeats…

My spirit has learned to tuck-and-roll.

I learned to adapt.
To create.
To keep trying.

Again.

“NO!” never became my identity.

______

When life went the wrong way on me…

I came face-to-face with the same painful question:

“What do I do NOW?”

Every time life squished me…

I picked myself up from the wreckage of a future I’d dreamed would be mine.

My next dream hadn’t been born yet.

Plan B wasn’t waiting in a drawer.

I had no map.

No answer.

No damn clue.

Not knowing tomorrow can suck.

______

But I kept trying to figure tomorrow out.

I kept looking inside myself to figure out how to live my outside self.

True…

I didn’t get the futures I once imagined.

I got a different life.

A life where I write.

Where I speak.

Where I bleed truth into both.

And I clap loud, give hope…

and continually whisper, “Go the extra mile!”

Maybe my rejections didn’t redirect me toward a life I planned.

Maybe they brought me a life I never knew to imagine.

Not every turn I took was automatically right.

Not every disappointment turned out to be a blessing.

Often…

I didn’t understand why things happened the way they did.

But…

I had to figure out how to live my life anyway.

So I did.

I kept dreaming.

I kept going.

______

WE keep going.

A dear friend recently lost her best friend unexpectedly.

Her young Mom.

She was working on a cruise ship when it happened…

and faced a 30+ hour journey home to the Philippines.

When the news came…

She felt extraordinarily lost.

She was deeply confused.

She questioned God.

And…

I have little doubt her grief will be part of her forever.

There is no sentence I can write that makes that loss okay.

No explanation that makes it fair.

No moving forward that brings her old world back.

She has to learn to live in a world that has changed.

One day at a time.

And she is doing that.

She is living with courage.

Even though life has taken her somewhere she never wanted to go.

______

Perhaps…

Life has taken you somewhere you never planned to go, too.

Maybe you’re living rejected.

Disappointed.

Angry.

Humiliated.

Maybe you’re looking at your life and asking:

“How did I get HERE?”

Maybe you did everything you knew to do.

Maybe you gave it everything you had.

And life still said, “No!”

Not because you didn’t give it your heart.

Not because you didn’t try your best.

It just didn’t happen.

I get it.

DEEPLY.

______

Sometimes the struggle isn’t finding the answer.

It’s getting up tomorrow when you still don’t have one.

It’s trying again when you’re tired of trying.

It’s accepting that the life you’re living isn’t the life you dreamed.

We can let life’s disappointments define us.

Or we can keep finding a way to define ourselves.

We can’t always choose the outcome.

Nor is the timing always on our clock.

But we can still decide whether disappointment gets the last word.

Even when we’re tired.

Even when we’re angry.

Even when we don’t have a damn clue what comes next.

______

Life can change the road beneath our feet.

It doesn’t get to make every decision about who we become.

I’m still me.

You’re still him.

You’re still her.

You’re still YOU.

S.

(Audio version)