There’s an earthquake and your favorite vase fell off the shelf. You look down at all the pieces and feel like you’re looking at your life on the floor. You fall apart. You feel like you have no control over outcomes. The life you planned isn’t the life you’re living. Sometimes the choices we make don’t form the path we planned. Maybe the career choice ended up not bringing joy to your life and now you feel stuck in the never ending cycle of going to a job you don’t enjoy. Possibly the person you married isn’t who you thought they were and now your life together doesn’t feel like happily ever after you thought it would be. It could be addiction snuck into your life, you can’t break the habit and it’s ruining every part of your life. You have children you loved from the start, but now you feel as if you have lost control of any influence in their life, you feel all you can do is sit by and watch their destruction. Let’s face it, in life there are many choices to be made with many uncertainties. We can try to plan our perfect future, but so often futures get derailed. What do we do with all the broken pieces of our lives? How do we fix other people? How do we fix ourselves? How do we fix what doesn’t work?
Unfortunately we don’t have the power to fix other people, including friends, spouses, teenage or adult children. That’s up to them. The people you want to fix, might be happy just the way they are. We can talk to people, express our thoughts and feelings, even try to influence them with words. However, it is ultimately up to them if they want to fix any part of themselves. Sometimes all we can do is stand idly by and watch consequences play out and let people learn their own lessons
We can fix ourselves and our lives though. We can make changes to put together parts that feel broken. Our missed career choice may just need a different attitude regarding our work place or perhaps we may need to take a more drastic step and switch careers all together. In married relationships that seem broken, often it could be a misconception. At times all that is needed is for one or the other to make more effort in the relationship. Meet your partner half way. Find thing’s to enjoy together again. So often people give up and exchange their partner for a different model, like trading out cars. However, In doing so they could likely find themselves in a similar situation, maybe with different issues. People are complex and it’s not a matter of finding a perfect partner, but rather learning how to be a better partner yourself. Actions are contagious. If you act in kindness, your partner may reciprocate. You can find the love that brought you together in the first place, but it does take equal effort on both parties. In addition, If you have developed habits you don’t like such as addiction, with effort, you can change them. Read the blog: Habits.
Working on the parts of your life and yourself that feel broken is just that, work. Nevertheless, the outcome of your work will be worth it. Broken hearts, broken dreams, broken promises, broken trust, broken friendships all can be a part of your rebuilt life. Each of these experiences, though hurtful, cause us to dig deep, think, and process. After you get beyond the tears, use these situations to learn from. This can be a lifelong process. Just when you think one part of your life is repaired, something else can break. Many times it takes things to break before we understand their value. Once we understand the value, we can use the broken pieces to rebuild a more beautiful, more meaningful life.
If another situation presents itself along the way, you may not feel broken like you did before, hopefully you will know what to do with the broken pieces. Living life doesn’t guarantee anything, life is a process of which we go through to learn, grow, and form the path’s to our destination.
When you’re finished, your life won’t look the same as it once was. The broken pieces, reminiscences’ of your previous life and experiences, will be held together by a strong bond of cemented pathways you have formed, creating a beautiful mosaic.
~Teri Storm