They say change is constant, but sometimes it really doesn’t feel like it.
We live our lives doing what feels right. As a little kid, it might be all about avoiding getting in trouble. And also getting hold of sweeties and toys like your life depends on it.
Then you get older and start looking for a partner. You find someone who is your soul mate. The love of your life. You might have children, you might not. Jobs, money and houses come and go. Parents get older and need you to take care of them. Kids leave home, then come back and seem to stay FOREVER!
Through all these changes you make decisions and choices that feel right at the time. Big life decisions. HUGE decisions.
And then what? In between the big things, you live your life. You live the way you’ve always done. Or you adapt to the way other people want to live. Maybe you live in a new way that fits the new stage of your life. But sometimes these new stages can go on for a long time. Perhaps longer than they should.
Beneath these conscious life choices something else is going on.
You’re moving through your own personal, individual life transitions or phases. Now I’m not going to go all woo-woo here, but there are aspects of our lives that we often don’t pay attention to.
~ The biochemical changes in our bodies as we grow, mature, and age.
~ The power of hormones in directing our actions, needs and desires (men & women)
~ Our personal development: mental, social, spiritual, emotional and physical.
~ The script we live by, deep in our subconscious mind, that tells us who we are, how we should behave, what our life should look like and what is right and wrong. And these can all be complete opposites. Complicated!
Big chunks of our lives just seem to happen. We do things that we don’t understand. We feel deeply dissatisfied with how things are. We feel powerless to make changes. We dream… if only…
If only I won lotto. If only I had a bigger, better house. If only the Universe would make something happen.
If only…
Of course everyone is different. You might manage your transitions differently to your friends. Or you compare how you’re feeling with how other people appear to handle the same phase of their life. They might appear blissfully happy. You might feel like something is wrong with you. Or you feel guilty for feeling the way you do.
No-one talks about it. Or they talk about it in a way that’s unhelpful. Agreeing and commiserating, feeding resentment or jealousy. But most of our life happens because we made a choice. Or you decided not to make a choice and stayed the same.
~ I’m not talking about mental illness, trauma, disaster or terrible accidental things that have happened to you. Just the usual life things.
Our lives are stuffed full of choices. But we rarely think about the choices we’re going to have to make a bit later on in our lives. How we might make that next phase a better one.
You might be feeling completely, hopelessly lost. Burnt out or stuck in a rut, so deep, so fixed, that you have no chance of escape. And that’s all you want, to escape. For something to be different.
Maybe YOU are different.
Maybe your life hasn’t caught up with you. Maybe that choice you made, or didn’t make, seemed good at the time, but now it just doesn’t serve you. The you, that you are now. It doesn’t mean it was a bad choice. It just means there’s been an evolution of some part of you since then.
You might be braver now or maybe you feel truly safe and secure with a solid foundation for you to explore what you would like to do.
Or perhaps you feel ready to burst out of the safe life you designed for yourself. Maybe those feelings of dissatisfaction, powerlessness or being hopelessly lost are strong enough to motivate you. Enough to drive you to make new brave and exciting choices.
When you realise that you’re not the person you were a year ago, but your life IS…
Then maybe it’s time. Your time to honour this transition in your life. To honour your new needs AND the parts of your old life that you want to keep. The choice is up to you.
Liz.
