I had a humbling lesson in acceptance from some friends the other day.  We were invited to a tree lighting ceremony in a town about an hour from us and we ended up in two different spots.  Both of us thought the other was in the wrong spot at first and my initial reaction was annoyance because I thought we were in the wrong spot after a minute and we had just spent money on parking.  I let the fear take over and I got angry about wasting money and about not communicating clearly where we were supposed to meet.  I didn’t want it to be about control because the point is that we were supposed to meet at a certain place at a certain time and we weren’t together.  Plus we had never done it before so I was upset they weren’t more clear with us about where we were going.  At the end of the day, it all worked out—we realized they were in the wrong spot, we stayed where we were, and they found us and didn’t need to pay additionally for their parking.  The lesson: relax, listen, breathe and it all works out in the end. It became a lesson in flow as well as love.

There were other moments that weekend that it felt like things were just kind of out of sync with everyone.  I had a few days off this past week and my husband and I enjoyed some lunches together.  During the last lunch he got a call and was invited to a friend’s house—I told him to go.  Later I found out that the wives were there and never invited me.  I started getting insecure. I was aggravated by everyone everywhere.  Like, we did what we needed to do, but everything was so busy and people were insane in the stores and we couldn’t find everything we needed. We left the store my husband wanted to go to and my kid asked if we could go somewhere he wanted to—I didn’t think it was a big deal because we had time but my husband didn’t want to.  My kid ended up crying in the backseat silently and I didn’t see his face until we got all the way to the next location.  Right away I was pissed because it felt like a power play.  All of this combined led me to feel extremely off kilter and frustrated—and insecure.  I started questioning if people didn’t like me because they kept blowing me off or not including me and the emotions kind of got all over the place. 

 So with this I realized that I’m still a control freak, especially when it comes to time.  I hate it when things aren’t planned out.  Like basic things like if we are going to meet people somewhere—where are we going to meet?  What time?  What are we actually doing?  I mean we don’t need every detail to the second, but we are too old wasting our time figuring out what we are going to do that evening when we get together.  We have other people involved and I have always found it rude to make people struggle to connect.  I know there is value in going with whatever the scenario brings but there is a time and place when we need to lock down some details or what the expectation is.  That part isn’t unreasonable in my mind.  But I can’t expect people to get there the same way I do.  People don’t have the same reaction to finding each other.  They don’t have the same reaction I do to making people wait, or waiting in chaos.  I can’t expect them to feel the same way I do or understand how I feel if they view it differently.    

So here was my lesson in flow: I have to let people be who they are because there is a reason I love them.  I love them more than my annoyance at feeling confused/lost when we aren’t communicating well.  And that is the key: we need to communicate better.  This is a relationship I value and want to take care of so that is more important than getting upset that I wasn’t in full control.  I don’t want them to be who I think they should be, I love them as they are.  There is a lot in life that we can’t control and we have to learn to navigate through it—it’s easier to do that with support and help from friends.  I can’t isolate myself because people aren’t living up to some arbitrary expectation.  The people are important, not that their behavior is what I thought it would be.  We need relationships and people we can rely on and in order to keep them around, we need to accept them as they are.