What does it take to spring forward?
How do we cope with the ups & downs of life?
How do we not give in?
For every headline that assaults our senses alerting us to bad stuff looming on the horizon, there are scores more messages of hope, encouragement, and inspiration if we take the time to pause and take in the good stuff.
“Into each life some rain must fall,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in his poem The Rainy Day,” behind the clouds the sun is still shining.”
What if you decide to think of your life challenges as rain falling in your live? Sometimes it’s a gentle mist of occurrences like lost keys, spilt milk, laundry piling up, or not enough sleep. Other times it’s a torrential downpour of a lump in your breast, moving to a new location, or losing your job? Or more devastating gale force winds and two-story tsunami waves whisking you off your feet so that you are left breathless after the loss of a loved one?
The question is: how does one weather these storms while waiting to see the sun still shining?
Rain brings new growth in in the spring. It’s the same for us. After any sort of life challenge, we change and we have the option to stay rooted, or grow. We make choices to reflect how we have grown.
The choices we make and how we grow, the depends on where we are in our lives. As children, we grow physical at a certain pace, and we can visible see that. However, the emotional maturity happens internally and is an individual phenomenon. None of us can escape it, it’s called growing up.
As we mature, more is expected of us. That’s when the rain turns from a mist to a light drizzle and perhaps a torrential downpour.
It’s when being consumed by a specific life experience that we are growing. The wisdom gleaned from each situation propels us to change. It is up to us if stay stagnant rooted in one place, or spring forward and move on.
Each of us has dealt with one (or all) of life’s major stressors at some point: the loss of a job, a major move, catastrophic illness, death of a loved one, or divorce. The whole world recently had to cope (and we still are) with a catastrophic illness that has taken the lives of many and forced us all to shift our day-to-day way of life.