Disoriented? Lost your moorings? Wondering which day it is? Missing your Zoom meeting while watching a replay of last night’s webinar? Feeling like last Spring’s sudden changes have become Fall’s endless corn maze experience?
What are we missing that would bring back a sense of normality in our lives?
Familiar constraints.
Yes, those limitations we always thought were holding us back, actually brought forth plans to resist or work around them, and a sense of accomplishment and purpose when we did so. Before the pandemic’s changes to your operating plans, how much of your daily routine was oriented toward superceding the limits you saw ahead in your day? Commute times impacted departure plans, wake-up times; bedtimes. Kid’s activities, sport events, club meetings meant food preparations and grocery shopping were scheduled during, or in-between everything else.
Our constraints can easily become our focus, which concentrates our efforts toward overcoming them, and leads to taking comfort in the degree of predictability we can establish in our lives. Thus we (unintentionally) come to think of our reactions to limitations/constraints around us as actions that are moving us forward instead.
In early 2020 many of the “given” constraints in our lives fell away. The plans we had made to keep our lives in order no longer applied and may not do so again for awhile. New demands have arrived, along with new limits to the fruitfulness of our efforts to meet them. And many of us feel like we are flailing at a curtain of darkness and confusion.
When the lights go out, we can keep looking for the switch,
or we can learn to see in the dark.
Maybe the pathways we’ve been traveling were built in response to limits we no longer have to work around or against. Maybe we’ve measured our own successes by our abilities to manage our lives within those constraints. Now is the time to examine what has consumed our efforts and defined our focus. Now is the time to determine what focus and direction we want in our lives, and design our life choices toward a mission and purpose we specifically choose; a clear view of how and who we want to BE in this world.
The uncomfortable inapplicability of our usual plans to our current situations (as we have adapted to the pandemic) may actually be bringing us a gift.
Every change presents an opportunity.
How much of your life has been a reaction to circumstances? What do you want your life to BE? Turn your efforts TOWARD your goals, rather than AWAY from what you have been trying to avoid, and LIVE FORWARD into possibilities you may never before have imagined.
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