When Life Interrupts... Life

Sometimes we're going about life and all seems to be running smoothly. The bills are paid. Work is going well. There's even a few dollars in the savings account. Family and friends are healthy and happy. Pets are doing well. We even have time to play. Life is working. We relax. We think "I could get used to this."

Then boom... boom... boom... Life interrupts itself.

Still, we're certain we can handle what's coming our way. This one thing and that one. It throws our schedule all wonky, but it's temporary. We can handle it. We know we can. We set up systems and plans and schedules because we know that's the best way to keep on track or at least stay close to on track.

But... Life has other ideas.

The next thing we know, our priorities have completely shifted and we're doing good to keep the basics done because life has decided all our planning is a joke. Life sets out to prove that all those ways we learned to cope with the expected unexpected won't work this time and we need new lessons.

Still, we're sure we're up to the task. We're resilient. We've been told a million times just how resilient we are. We completely believe it on our best days and almost believe it on our worst. Until we don't...

This post was going to be all about how I deftly handled it when life interrupted my schedule, my entire life, and how I got everything back on track quickly and easily. But... that's not what happened, and I want to be honest.

So here's the truth. When life interrupts life, the only option is to make the best of it and do the best you can. There's no step by step guide to make life what it was before. Life can only be what it is now.

The past few years have been hard on my family, my friends, my acquaintances, and me as well as people I've never met and will never meet. We've had our individual and collective struggles. We've lost our footing and had to find it again. Some of us have let each other down as we coped with our own life interruptions. Some of us have reached out and held on tight to keep others treading just above water until we found our footing again. Some of us have held on to each other as we struggled to find our footing at the same time. We've celebrated successes that felt at best bittersweet and often tainted by the sadness in our hearts. We've mourned losses that cut deeper than we imagined possible. We've hurt and we've healed and we've hurt again and we've healed again and...

As I've watched life move on in my life and in the lives of people around me, I've come to understand better that when life interrupts life, it's not really an interruption no matter how much it feels like one and/or no matter how much we might want it to be. It's a trajectory change. While some activities have to be paused or slowed down considerably to address the moment, life moves forward step by step with or without our attention.

Sometimes these trajectory changes allow us to look more closely at our priorities and figure out where our attention needs to be. Sometimes they don't, but when they do, it's important to pay attention. We only get this one life filled with the good and the bad. We can take each moment as it comes, but that doesn't mean we can't remember what brought us to this moment or plan for the next moment.

When life interrupts life, it can feel like everything we know is shifting beneath our feet as we stand on the precipice on tiptoe waiting for the inevitable fall. We can teeter and totter as we struggle with the moment, but we're still standing there. Sometimes it's hard to turn away from that moment to return to the life moving on without us because turning away feels like letting go. But it doesn't have to. Turning away from a moment we feel stuck in can mean taking with us everything we learned from that moment and the moments preceding it.

We all go through these life interruptions that are really just moments in our lives that feel like they remove us from our lives for a short period of time. The mistake is thinking those moments change nothing. I tried for months to get my schedule, my life as it was, back on track. Then finally one day, I just accepted that things had changed and I needed to adapt with the changes. Accepting that now isn't then gave me the power and the insight to move forward from where I am now instead of trying to recapture what was then.

To learn more about me and my work, please visit my website. To be notified when I publish new work, follow me on Amazon.