When Crisis Has Changed
Your Life
by
James E. Miller
Sometimes
life hurts us.
Sometimes it robs us of something, or someone, very dear.
Sometimes it causes us pain
a pain we did not choose and do not want.
Sometimes life severely restricts us.
When that happens, we feel out of control.
We may be tempted even to question the meaning of our lives,
asking, "Why me?", "Why mine?", "Why this?", "Why now?".
A future we had taken for granted will not come to be.
Plans, carefully drawn up, will not lead where we expected.
We find ourselves face-to-face with life circumstances not of
our liking.
Life choices not of our making.
A life, in short, we don't quite know how to live.
We wonder: how do we go on?
Where is the meaning?
And how do we re-design our lives when the future that is
before us is so different from the one we've foreseen?
What must happen first is quite clear, quite natural-- and
perhaps quite overwhelming.
We must let out our feelings.
And we will have many of them.
There may be anger, even outrage-- that this unfairness has happened to us,
and "ruined" our life.
There may be fear, even terror-- that we won't be able to cope, that we'll
fall apart.
There may be sadness-- for something important to us has ended, something
that gave us joy is gone.
There may be despair-- as we doubt if life will ever be as good
as it once was.
There may be feelings of guilt-- for the role we played in what happened, or
for the pain that what has hurt us hurts others as well.
Our feelings matter, whatever
they are, for they arise from very
deep within.
Whatever our feelings are, they
are uniquely our own, for no one has been through exactly what we have been
through.
So whatever we feel, it is ours to feel. And however we feel, it will help
to give our feelings words, either spoken or written, sung or unsung,
full-throated or whispered.
And we may need to do this, not once, but many times, for our feelings ebb
and flow over the course of days, weeks, months.
What will not help is to bottle up our feelings, keeping them tightly
sealed. Because eventually pressure will build, and our feelings will demand
to be released, one way or another.
We may surprise ourselves with the strength of our feelings, but that is
okay--and even good.
For the presence of strong
feelings today is a good prediction that we'll have strong ones tomorrow as
well.
Tomorrow, when we'll feel something very different,
and more encouraging.
So this is our first fragile
step: to release our feelings, so that eventually they will release us. As
we do so, we will discover an inner strength beginning to grow inside us,
giving us hope, leading us on.
Gradually, the initial shock wears off and it becomes a time for exploring.
A time to learn more about what has happened to us, so that we'll know more
about what to expect, about what we need to do, and not do.
If we are diligent in our
search, we will uncover riches of information-- others who have persevered,
and how they have done so; others who share our lot in life, and how we can
be connected.
The more we explore, the more we
will learn about the choices we have before us, for no matter what we're
dealing with, there are choices.
We are free to choose what steps
we will take today, and what steps we will put off until tomorrow. And even
though we may have no control over what has happened to us, we do have
certain control over how we respond to what has happened.
We may choose to go into hiding,
from others, from ourselves-- or we may choose to be as open and as honest
as we can be.
We may choose to give up,
thinking "What's the use?"-- or we may choose to marshal all our resources
in our drive to re-build our future.
We may choose to become
embittered-- or we may learn to become more understanding, more accepting,
and wiser.
We may choose to become locked
in unceasing anger-- or we may release ourselves to give more freely with
our love.
As we learn more about this
crisis in our life, it will serve us well to remember what crisis actually
means:
it is a turning point which
challenges our ability to cope.
It is a time when forces collide, and the outcome is unknown.
It is that point when life will go one way or another, when it is ripe with
possibility.
This writing is
an excerpt is from the Willowgreen videotape
How Do I Go On?
Re-designing Your Future After Crisis Has Changed Your Life
by James E. Miller. You can learn more about this resource,
as well as other Willowgreen resources about loss and grief,
here. |
