Living With Uncertainty

Posted on by stilllearning2b

Like many (most? all?) of you, I’m struggling right now.

As a teacher, I’m used to a certain rhythm of the school year. And by now, I should be excited for summer, exhausted by the demands of the end of the school year and putting energy into finalizing plans for the next school year.

Instead, I’m sad about not being able to say goodbye in person, more blah than exhausted and the next school year is simply one big question mark.

I find myself increasingly distressed by the unknown of what’s coming. I keep reflecting back on the comfort (unappreciated at the time) of past years, when plans were in place and I could find peace in the surety of what was around the next corner.

But then I catch myself. Because those plans of past years were only certainties because I’m viewing them from the perspective of the future, where the scheduled events were carried out with only relatively small adjustments.

The truth is that uncertainty is always present, we simply hide it away beneath a veneer of imagined control, applied so that we don’t have to face the discomfort of admitting that we don’t have the ultimate say in what happens.

This year is no more or less uncertain than any other time. The outcomes are always in limbo and only seem inevitable once they occur.

Of course, the unknowns are more pronounced right now, like magma bubbling to the surface after a seismic event. It’s difficult to imagine what next week will look like, much less next month or next year. We are all being forced to drop our plans. In reaction, we’re grasping to control what we can – setting rules and boundaries for our families, calling out those who aren’t socially distancing the way we are and arguing against the ways our governments are handling the outbreak and the economic fallout.

It certainly FEELS different.

Because we become so accustomed to life unfolding in relatively predictable ways. And it’s only when it breaks open that we realize how that predictably is a story we tell ourselves so that we can sleep at night.

I keep thinking back to my summer 11 years ago. In a span of hours, I went from believing that I would never be apart from my then-husband to learning that everything we had together was a lie. Upon the discovery, I felt like I was in free fall, unable to trust anything. But in reality, the revelation of the duplicitous life wasn’t anything new, it simply uncovered what had always been there. I fought against that unknown for a time, craving the feeling of solid ground beneath my feet again. Yet it is was only when I stopped struggling to control every outcome that I was able to relax.

The lesson in all of this isn’t going to be found in finding a new way to try to control life. It’s in learning how to find acceptance that there is little outside ourselves that we can control and finding peace regardless.

Most days, I’m still struggling against this. But I’m finding moments when I can simply be in – and appreciate- today without undo concern for tomorrow.

Hope you all are well and are able to find your moments of peace.

This is hard. And also, in the words of Glennon Doyle, “We can do hard things.”

Lisa

 

Feels Like I’ve Been Here Before

Posted on by stilllearning2b

I keep getting the strange sense of deja vu.

Feeling like I’ve been here before.

Which is crazy on the surface of things. After all, this is a global pandemic, the likes of which have not been seen for 100 years.

None of us have been here before.

Yet, for those of us who have been through one or more of those life-altering moments – the discovery of infidelity, abandonment, sudden and profound loss – this may feel strangely familiar. After all, we know what it’s like to wake one morning to discover that the world we knew, the world which we trusted to ground us, no longer exists.

We are familiar with the grief that sneaks up and tugs at our guts when we’re not paying attention. And we are no longer surprised when we grieve the small things as much as the big ones.

We’ve experienced that strange sense of disbelief, of thinking that somehow this is all just a tragic mistake and that the reality we knew simply needs to be recovered.

We know the fear that comes with the uncertainty and the deep craving to return to a sense of safety. And we know that over time the belief things will return to normal is replaced with an acceptance that a sense of peace only comes once we’ve adapted to the new situation.

We’ve lived through that life turned upside-down, where the normally innocuous things have become threats hidden around every corner.

We’ve endured those long nights wishing things could be different before we dry our tears and pledge to focus on what we can control. And we learn both how small our influence is and also how powerful it can be.

We’ve tried to run away from our pain in the hope that we can distract our way out of it only to find that it cannot be outrun.

We’ve been through those moments of utter defeat when we feel like we’re not strong enough to get through this, only somehow we manage to make it through that day. And then the next.

This may be new. You haven’t been through this challenge yet.

But you’ve made it through others.

You know what to do.

 

When Your Head Knows… But Your Heart Doesn’t

Posted on by stilllearning2b

Are you staying with the status quo because it is right… or because it is comfortable? Change is hard and so we often try to talk ourselves out of it, even when we know it’s the right thing to do.