The new year may bring new opportunities.
Also other things may be coming to an end, or end abruptly which can rock the boat and take some time to recover from.
For many years now my calendar year has had certain elements that were like seasons.
Seasons offer opportunities for routines and those are nice because they are familiar and you can plan for and expect certain outcomes.
Then life throws a spanner in the works.
How we manage when life throws curveballs at us depends on our resilience – and I’ve talked about this elsewhere before; resilience is like our buoyancy and the tools we have available to us. Some of us float better than others, and some of us know how to tread water, or have inflatable floating devices, or flippers offering additional help.
At this point life has been rocky since mid-to-late 2019, so when I received some out of the blue news at the end of January, mere days from the one of my seasons beginning, it catapulted my life into a tail spin as I tried to grasp at solutions.
The notice period wasn’t something workable like two weeks.
It was 6 calendar days, and only 3 of those being business days as the news was delivered on a Thursday evening and the Monday was a public holiday.
What to do?
Not panic, though that’s a pretty strong initial response.
Cuss? Get angry and rant.
Check.
Then think about what options I have immediately available.
One was to begin researching alternative options,.
Another was drawing on a possible solution that I had previous experience with in a different context and required a fairly straightforward process and so that’s what I completed that night.
But naturally I was stressing about being left in the lurch, the financial impact and the burden of trying to find a solution, so I didn’t get much sleep.
Lack of sleep is a great catalyst for the downward spiral.
Hindsight is wonderful. When I received notice that my possible solution had been declined rendering it a non-option. I didn’t have any other alternative underway. I had been waiting anxiously just blindly hoping that it would work out.
It didn’t.
So the hindsight is that I could have started down other paths simultaneously so that if one option didn’t pan out I’d already be a ways down another path.
But seeing as that’s not what I did, and though it left me still without a solution meaning more time would pass before this was all resolved, it did have one extremely big benefit. It helped me firmly decide what direction I would take.
I become open.
I was able to drop my anticipations in a way that thankfully left me open and not closed off to achieving a solution.
I first felt all the feelings – despair, anger, resentment.
Went to bed. Tossed and turned.
Woke up the next morning even more exhausted, but with a new fire! A determination and commitment to pursuing a path that has already dragged me head first into overwhelm, but is a commitment that will pay off dividends in the long run.
That’s all I can say on that for now. I am waiting to receive confirmation of the outcome of an application I submitted in February. And this unexpected journey will change the course of my life, but in a way that I am really excited about – even though I shouldn’t get my hopes up yet.
Unfortunately, the waiting period is now lengthy and out of my control.
But if you have a brief moment to cross your fingers and send some sunshine my way that would be amazing.
However, there are much more deserving people in the world right now that need all the support that we can give!
x Just Heather