I have two rather large beliefs in this world.
First, I am a huge believer in "things happening for a reason". Not Karma and "what goes around comes around". It is not a feeling about what people deserve. It is more along the lines of situations, whether it is a good or a bad one, they happen so we can reflect and use them to build our future selves. Always learning something from everything life throws our way. That’s not to say that it may take quite some time to understand why they happened. Trust me, there are still situations that have occurred where I am still questioning why. Yet, I know deep down that every instance has a reason and one day I will understand why they happened.
Second, I feel that life events truly are connected to one another. Things happen to teach us lessons to use in future events so we can handle them in a better light. Let me explain my most recent connection.
I recently took a job as an On-Call seminar provider. What that means is that I get an email and they ask me to publicly speak at an event on a topic consistent with my credentials. Recently, they have been talks about How to Manage Stress. It is a great topic. And if I am being completely honest, every time I perform this topic, I fall in love a little bit more with the material. Part of the slide discusses how you need categorize your stressors in 1 of 4 categories.
I am going to focus on one stressor category (for the sake of time and this story). So when I talk about Important / Uncontrollable stressors, I usually use an instance from my life when in which I lost my mom to cancer and the hardships I dealt with. I explain how I had come to acceptance that she was going to die a little bit before her death and from that point on, it changed my mentality when being with her. I was not longer “going to find a cure” but instead, I was to make sure she was happy. I came, I fought & now I was ready to party with her by my side. I have some of the best memories from that.
So, I took a trip; a 24 hour trip this weekend. To do something that needed to be done. To visit a friend that is not in the best of health and is deteriorating quicker than anyone would want him to. I went there with the mindset that I was going to be a pillar of strong support; the crying post if they needed. I was ready to get hit with all the feeling that flood your body when you experience something that you want to change but you cannot. The bottomless pit feeling of angry, hurt, pain, sadness and overall sickness.
Yet, no; that did not happen. On my way down there, all I kept thinking about was my Categorizing Stressors seminar and my speech about my mom and what I preach to all the people that come to hear me talk. I got out of the car, guns blazing. My job became, how do I make this man and his wife have the best 18 hours I can give them. We talked about the holidays and how it was almost Christmas. We got the idea that we can decorate his wheels for the holidays and dye his hair green and add a star to his head and he would be his own personal Christmas tree. We laughed as we shopped for supplies, we cried happy tears as he giggled at us because of how excited we all were and hugged it out when the finish product came out just as we hoped (except for the fact that we could not find battery powered lights at Walmart at 8pm on a Saturday).
PPS, Walmart on a Saturday night 8pm, Let us revisit that in another post.
Boomerang (the phrase when you get off topic and realize you got to get back to it), We all laughed. I did not give him more time here on earth to spend with his beautiful wife. I did not give him the magic cure so that he could go be a hero and fight forest fires again. I was not even able to help him get his leg movement back so that he could walk by himself again. But we were able to give the man a couple of hours of relief from the everyday stress of dealing with his situation.
Maybe that is the connection. Maybe me taking this job opened my eyes to coping techniques about stress in my own life because somehow the “universe” knew I would need it. Old me would sit there with puppy eyes, waiting for tears to come from others so I could hold them tight. But new me knows that coping and how to move past is where making life a little better might just be.
Thanks “Universe” for helping me move past myself and my feeling so I could better help someone else.
You are all right in my book.
