Years ago, I read a compilation of six-word memoirs for which the editors Rachel Fershleiser and Larry Smith asked writers and others to summarize their life story in six words. What would your six-word memoir be? Mine would be lifted from the book’s pithy title: Not Quite What I Was Planning.
Life can be described in many ways but rarely is it predictable. If we are fortunate enough to take a good number of tours around the sun, we will see life unfold in ways we could never have foreseen. Yet so many suffer when life doesn’t turn out as they had planned, expected, or hoped. So often people in my office find themselves stuck with this discrepancy, arguing with the givens, trying to change the past, and bargaining with the way life has unfolded so far.
This is where I find that perfect six-word memoir serves as a helpful reminder. In youth, if all goes well (and even when it does not), it’s possible to imagine a limitless fabulous life for our future selves. Once a person reaches middle age, if not earlier, life has knocked us around some and invariably has handed us disappointments along the way. If we manage the developmental task of digesting life’s disappointments, we are free to now make the most of the life we have rather than the life we once dreamed of. If not, you may find yourself in an existential crisis asking “is this all there is?”
How then, do we manage life’s disappointments?
Don’t take the unpredictability of life personally. Realize that most people don’t live the life they planned for, hoped for, or expected.
Mourn your disappointments fully so they are integrated into your being and life story.
Find ways to adjust to the new normal. Try not to get drawn into thinking how your life “should” have been, based on the dreams of your younger self or a comparison to other lives that seem more attractive. Instead, fully embrace the life you have and endeavor to make it more satisfying in attainable ways.
Realize that just because you have suffered disappointments, or life isn’t quiet what you’d thought it would be, doesn’t mean that life can’t be grand.
If we adjust our expectations to come to terms with the fact that yes, this is life, even if not quite what I was planning, then we are more free to enjoy the life we in fact have.
Image by Jake Heckey from Pixabay