The Best-Laid Plans ~

I'm sorry to say that I haven't been doing very well this week, but I went to the doctor today, so should be feeling much better soon. Not wishing to leave you on your own too long, I decided to give you a page from Victoria Moran's book Younger By the Day: 365 Ways to Rejuvenate Your Body and Revitalize Your Spirit. I give it to you with the thought that it's exactly how I feel. I hope you take something from it for yourself.

The Best-Laid Plans

One reason midlife disappointment is all too common a syndrome is that we sometimes reach the point of having our plans play out, and we don't like what we see. Someone may have liberally (to her thinking) given her children lifestyle choices A, B, and C, only to find that as adults they've chosen D, "none of the above." Someone else may have done everything right: worked hard on her job and in her marriage, saved regularly for a blissful retirement, and then found herself widowed, or caring for a partner with a debilitating disease.                                                    

Such things happen because life on earth is not a sure thing. We can do our best, hedge our bets, put unassailable actions behind well-conceived plans, and still find ourselves the exception to the rule. What do you do in a case like that? First, feel what it feels like--probably rotten. Sit with the feelings. Write about them. Talk about them. But don't reach for them when they start to subside. They're meant to go, and you're meant to go forward.

Going forward means acquiring the kind of flexibility that can make something lovely out of Plan B. It's seeing the big picture, that you're a soul on a path, rather than the little picture of you as a woman alone, or one whose retirement savings half vanished at the whim of the stock market. It's making beauty out of the available ingredients, the way you can make a nourishing soup out of last night's leftovers plus an onion and a few potatoes.                       

And it's the stalwart commitment to continue making plans and doing the work to fulfill them. If you make them, they might not turn out. If you don't, they will not. Give yourself the best odds for the best life. Work with what you've got--that onion and those potatoes--and concoct something warm and comforting and delicious.

Revitalize Your Life With Words: If one plan is derailed, I have a dozen to take its place.

Victoria Moran has written many books which can help you have a better life. And she has a website that you might want to look up. In any case, I hope you can give her words of wisdom some thought.

Blessings...Mimi