This Is The Beauty Of Letting Life Happen

I’ve always been an over-planner, an over-thinker, an over-doer. I like to feel as if I’m in control, as if I have power to change the direction of my life or shift what’s happening to me so that it all falls according to my plan. I like to know what’s going to happen before it does, like to play scenarios out in my head, like to use my words to make sense of this world as much as I can. Even though I know, in the back of my mind, that’ll never fully happen.

But somewhere between college graduation and this exact moment, sitting in a crowded coffee shop, listening to the low hum of voices mixed with ocean waves—I’ve learned that there’s so much power in letting life happen.

See, you cannot control your life. No matter how much pre-planning you do, no matter how organized you are, no matter what you try to prepare for, or think about, or fix – you’ll always end up with a shift, a turn, a twist, an unexpected moment that causes you to suddenly free fall.

But the beauty about freefall, is in that moment, you find your wings.

If you’re always waddling around in the nest, always standing on the edge with one only foot out, always twittering on your toes instead of taking the leap – You’ll never know if your body can carry you.

You’ll never know the strength in your muscles if you don’t flex them. You’ll never know who you can become, if you don’t take the first step.

You’ll never know if you can fly if you’re always tethered to the ground.

And after a long time of living in the comfortable, in the familiar, in a bubble that I could think and order and organize and plan – I finally jumped.

And I learned that I could fly.

But I also learned that the winds will change, that sometimes I’ll fall first, that sometimes I’ll falter, that sometimes I’ll soar, that sometimes I’ll shift into a new direction altogether.

But I wouldn’t have known any of this, if I hadn’t given my life a chance to take its own course.

See, what I learned, is that there’s beauty in letting life happen. There’s beauty in being vulnerable with people, and opening your heart. There’s beauty in letting your higher power write your story. There’s beauty in letting fate decide your course.

There’s beauty in letting go and watching what happens, completely and wonderfully out of your control.

When you let life happen, you allow people the chance to get to know you. You allow the unexpected to creep in and soak into your pores. You become open to opportunity, to change, to growth. You start believing in things you never thought you would.

When you let life happen, you quit worrying about you cannot fix, cannot save, cannot change. And you start embracing the imperfect, beautiful mess of being human.

When you let life happen, you fall into new jobs and new apartments, new friends and new memories, new mistakes and new challenges.

You stop being that over-thinker, that worry-wart, that analyzer.

And you start becoming the person you were meant to be – unburdened and unbound.