Sometimes We Just Have To Let Go And Let Life Happen Without Trying To Control It

You won’t always get what you want. But often you might just get what you need.

It will be frustrating, disappointing, cause anxiety and tread on your dreams but you must have faith in a brighter future.

As we kick off 2017, many will continue lamenting the fallen ruins of 2016. Disappointing election results, deaths of their idols or loved ones, and unfulfilled hopes and goals. It would almost seem like everyone lost something in some way during the year.

But here’s the thing – your life is not an IKEA package. It does not unfold perfectly like pre-packaged furniture into a determined, refined design. It is random, capricious, serendipitous and sometimes just strange.

The fact about life is that sometimes things just won’t work out the way you thought it should.

You’re famed, you’re reviled. You’re everyone’s best friend, worst friend. You’re richer than yesterday, poorer than yesterday, healthy this week, fat tomorrow. She loves you today. You’re forgotten next month. You confidently ascend the rungs of young adulthood – you have a car, a mortgage, a partner you think will be there forever – and then you’re a mess on the floor halfway through a bottle, and scrolling through old pictures on your phone of what was.

Life works in the most challenging and mysterious of ways. And that’s okay. We can’t always hold on to what we had hoped would happen. Sometimes it is not the winning of our goals, but the losing that gives us our sanity, our aliveness. The reality check might just poise us for better greatness going forward.

Sometimes it is the shock results in the election that gives us our wisdom. We all thought it would be an “in” vote, we all thought it would be Hilary. Everyone needs to lose sometimes otherwise we fail to see what we ignored. It has made us smarter, more aware. And only now can we retrace the dots on where we went wrong. But, first, we have to let go.

There is perhaps nothing harder to let go of than an ended relationship. But we can’t keep holding on to what might have been. Sometimes it’s not the love that makes us feel alive, but the cold sobering of love lost that brings us to feel alive again. Like pressing your face against a cold window, it reminds you that you’re not made of plastic. You’re real. And as you feel the precipitation on your face, you realise how life affirming that is. You are just a human being. A carbon dot in the galaxy. You don’t have super powers and you can’t control the future.

Everyone must have their heart broken once. Maybe twice. Otherwise how do we realise how bad things were? So sometimes you just have to let go and start loving yourself more, and what you have to give. After all, we are not defined by our relationships or our breakups, we are defined by who we are and what we do.

But with so much unpredictability in the world, it would seem like we should just not make goals. Maybe we should just not dream?

Never.

We should strive for what we believe we can achieve and hold a vision of what we want in our minds.

As much as you like to believe there is a premeditated plan for you (and I believe there is), you just have to be flexible for whatever eventually happens. You have to have faith that there will be a better plan for you – and for everyone.

You’re young. You’re old. You live and then you don’t. And in between, you won’t always get what you want. But often you might just get what you need.