A tough lesson I’m working on lately is accepting if it all falls apart, let it implode. Observing the situations objectively, the question becomes What happens if it all implodes?  If we can’t stop it anyway, then we really only have one option: We find a way to begin again.  No, destruction isn’t fun—it can be down right terrifying and disorienting to what we know of the world.  Sometimes the destruction we face is a result of our own actions, sometimes it isn’t.  We fear it and are afraid of it, try to control it, but when we reach the point of total acceptance that destruction is inevitable, we understand that certain things in our lives are meant to fall, not to destroy us, but so we can build again.  There is purpose in destruction.  We all know it’s unpleasant (especially when it’s unexpected) but it’s no reason to avoid it.  The saying you can’t make an omelet without scrambling a few eggs seems fitting here: sometimes to get something new, you have to break something old.  The past can teach us a lot and there are certain elements of it that need to be revered, but if we don’t learn to let certain pieces lie, to break a few things to make something new, we end up carrying around mountains of baggage that serve no purpose, treading on eggshells our whole lives and then that past becomes a burden.  We don’t need to drag around the broken pieces, the pieces that don’t work to prove a point, that we were right.  Sometimes we have to recognize when we’re trying to make a bad thing work and know when to walk away.

As a recovering/perhaps present control freak, letting go is a real struggle for me—especially in the midst of large change and some of those changes will require my decision—so I will have to know when to detonate those facets of my life.  I want to know the future and it’s one thing to have to pivot to change, it’s another to know your entire world is going to change and have to be the one to do it.  I want to know what choices I will have as a result of the choices I make now.  I want to know what everyone thinks and feels and what they will do.  I always prided myself on my ability to read people pretty well and know what they would do in any given situation and I got pretty good at it—but there are people around me who I thought I knew like the back of my hand who have pulled some stunts so out of left field I’m not sure I ever knew them at all.  I worked really hard to keep them in the definitions I created for them, as the person I knew them as and I made excuses and allowances for all the behaviors toward me and others that I would never tolerate—or I never thought I would—and I know I never said I would.  So much for predicting behavior of others if I couldn’t even predict my own.  It was a crash course in learning not everything works as we predict it.  We can only band-aid so much and there are only so many cracks we can fill before the foundation starts to crumble like sand and the entire thing falls apart.  Trying to hold the foundation together is impossible, it falls through our fingers like sand and holding the weight of what we built without a foundation will only bury us.  And we can’t stop it from falling anyway.

Life does what life does—it IS.  There doesn’t have to be a reason for anything, and no, our human hands aren’t strong enough to make people do what we want them to or force anything to happen any more than we can prevent a mountain from coming down or a hurricane.  We know that’s logical but when we have an emotional attachment to an idea we had, a vision of what we thought life would look like, it’s hard to let it go.  It’s hard to work on something and have a particular image in mind—the time and effort we put into it.  We really want it to work out so we know it was worth it.  We’re all waiting for that “worth it” moment because if we can make it through all the crap and arrive where we wanted to be, that satisfaction means something.  To near the finish line and not be able to cross, to have to run back to the start, is exhausting and disheartening.  It doesn’t have to be but I’d be lying if I said human nature is anything but disappointed in those moments.  I can’t pretend I know that type of disappointment will be worth it.  I know it isn’t easy to get back up after that type of fall, where everything built is just gone.  But I know on some level that there has to be a reason for it—and it makes life a lot easier to go with what IS versus trying to change the course of the river.  I would be remiss if I said that I can’t see some light ahead in the things that are falling apart.  I’m seeing the structure I thought supported me was merely an obstacle even if there was a certain familiarity and comfort in it.  But letting it explode is far easier than holding it in or holding up the mountain that’s crumbling.  And in that destruction is creation—and entire new universe borne of bits and pieces all forming something new.