Sometimes things don’t go as planned (Lesson #7)

Sometimes things don’t go as planned. Accept it and move on.

This is not the life I planned for myself. Ultimately, it’s a good life (thanks be to God), but in regard to marriage, let’s just say that things did not go according to plan.

Behind these two simple sentences lies a colossal and complex network of emotions that I would rather not have had to deal with. I still have to deal with it on occasion, even though I wish I didn’t have to.

I don’t have my white picket fence. Now, given that I dreamt of having this ‘fence’ my whole life, practically, it’s a really hard dream to reconstruct. I could go on and on about the fact that even when I thought I had my nice white picket fence, I actually didn’t (as I know now). But my aim today isn’t to pit my former married life against my current divorced life to try and figure out which was/is more virtuous.

My aim is to simply say that things just don’t go as planned sometimes. For whatever reason.  The bottom line is that, at some point, one needs to move on. This is impossible to do, though, without first accepting the fact that life just happens sometimes. Happens to the best of us.

This post isn’t about what ‘accepting’ it means, either, because acceptance will play out differently for each person. For some, it might mean the end of a marriage; for others, it might mean a new beginning within a troubled marriage. And for some, it might mean something else.

The point is to get moving. Fight your darndest not to get stuck in a rut of bitterness and inertia. Move on.

It’s the difference between being a running brook and a stagnant pool. After this occurred to me, I did a minute of quick and dirty research on the difference between these two kinds of water bodies. Stagnant water provides a better incubator for bacteria and parasites (contaminated as it usually is with feces and other stuff – ewww …). In running water, fish can simply wait for their food to be delivered (through the movement of the water), while in stagnant water, the fish need to go in search for their food. Moving water absorbs more oxygen than stagnant water, and attracts fewer insects.

I’ll take the running brook any day.