Life sometimes feels like a ball of wool that a particularly playful cat has gotten hold of. You know the one. Its tangled, messed up and looks decidedly worse for wear – I am referring to the wool and not the cat!
It doesn’t matter whether this tangled mess is your internal or external world, or both. It remains a mess and it gets to a point where you just can’t ignore it any longer.
Let me tell you the story of one of my intimate experiences with chaos because of huge internal resistance to facing what really was going on in my life at the time.
About 25 years ago, my messed-up ball of wool finally caught my attention and disrupted the status quo.
I was unhappily married and the days were a blur of intermittently ill children, going to work for too little money and too much rush-hour traffic, paying a home loan, my failing health, homework, laundry and feeding all of us – including a menagerie of animals.
On the outside, it looked like we had the perfect suburban family: a new home, 2 cars, 2 dogs, 2 successful careers (what amazed me is how successful we were and we really did not enjoy what we were doing) and 2 children attending private school. It seemed we had it made. We had, after all, followed the rules of being a responsible adult.
My plan to drive the car from one of the most scenic roads in South Africa, failed because God had another plan for me. So I was stopped from disrupting my life for good on that sunny Monday morning. In shock, I sat on the floor of the home office, ‘woke up’ and realised that my ball of wool was unravelling at high speed.
Deep inside, I knew that I couldn’t wait until I was ready. Ready is not an emotion or a feeling state. Its a decision. On that day, in that home office, I made a decision to stop the chaos and live because God had decided I was ready.
So when I say the clichéd term “I know how you feel” I truly mean it. I have been there. Not once. Many times. Even now, my ball of wool becomes entangled on this journey called my life. The difference is that I am aware of the chaos I am creating and can help myself before it becomes an unrecognisable mess.
Result?
The disruption of my status quo led to a radical journey of immense self-care, which is the topic of the next post.
See you there 🙂
“Ready is not an emotion or a feeling state. Its a decision” as you so rightly say , it all comes down to choice.
Made me think about Viktor Frankl and his famous quote about choice. “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Yes! Love the quote by Victor Frankl. And both of us had the same theme today with respect to overwhelm. Gotta love the synchronicity!