When Life Doesn’t Work Out the Way You Wanted, Remember This

Life lessons to remember for tough times

We start out life so hopeful. No matter how bad it might have been growing up, we’re sure things will only get better. But life unfolds in ways we never expect. We begin to figure out that our careful plans are sometimes no more than wishes on dandelions that life blows away with a sudden changing wind.

It can seem so incredibly arbitrary. I look back at my life and see how the smallest, most insignificant of choices led to a series of events that shaped my life in one direction rather than another. I could never anticipate the outcome. I still can’t.

Sometimes, I think about the nursery rhyme, The House that Jack Built. It works in layers — how one choice impacts the rest. Everything is circular and connected. So, all those things that seemed arbitrary, maybe they were…and maybe they weren’t.

Forget philosophy, theology, fate, or predestination. Instead, it helps me to remember that where one thing didn’t work out, something else did. It wasn’t always a better something. That depended entirely on my choices. But some of the things that came into my life were better than anything I had wished for myself.

When life goes sideways, it can be important to remember these life lessons:

Life won’t always go our way. But it teaches us patience, resilience, and flexibility. The opportunity is there to learn to go with the flow — and to fight for what we value most while understanding that sometimes we’re challenged simply to let go.

Not everyone will agree with our choices. They don’t have to. The last time I checked it’s our life, not theirs. We get to live it in the manner of our choosing, and we’re the ones to suffer (or enjoy) the natural consequences of our decisions. No one else has a say in the making of them. The growth opportunity here is learning to set healthy boundaries while living authentically.

We don’t have to like it. We are entitled to whatever feelings we have about any given situation. That’s 100% okay. No one said we had to enjoy every life experience. But there are lessons here, too. We can change our mindset, or we can figure out a new path forward. There are near-limitless choices if we empower ourselves to choose them.

We still get to choose the way we live. We choose our attitudes. Our perceptions. Our reactions or responses. Our next move. The kind of lives we live. How we treat others. How we treat ourselves. How we give back to others, or don’t. How we love, or hate. How we spend our time. How we teach others through our words and actions. What we believe. We can empower ourselves to see just how much is in our control — even when life feels out of control entirely.

These are powerful concepts, and they can be applied to nearly any situation. If we think back on plot twists in our own lives, we can remember how things didn’t go our way and not everyone agreed with us. We had whatever feelings about it, and we still got to choose.

Sometimes, we make poor choices. But we can also learn from them. If we’re paying attention, we can absorb the lesson and let that stay with us longer than whatever pain the experience caused us.

If this sounds like the voice of experience, that’s because it is. I’d love to say smugly that I learned this by going with the flow of life and accepting everything with calm and aplomb. But if I said that, I would be a dirty, rotten liar. Because I have no chill. I don’t easily accept difficult life changes. I have held on too many times, kicking and screaming, when I should have let go.

I’ve learned these lessons not because I’ve made all the best choices or lived the most fabulous existence, but because I’ve tried and lost and grieved, and tried again. The lessons were hard-learned and hard-won, and they hurt, even as they made me stronger.

I’ve come to a point in my life where my quest for courage and for raw, deep, unrelenting authenticity has pushed me to share my story in the hope it makes someone else’s struggle just the tiniest bit easier, or at least provides a little light at the end of a tunnel. Every time I tell my story, I heal a little more.

That healing is also painful — just like our bodies experience pain when we break them and then re-knit into something resembling wholeness. But it’s also wondrous and beautiful, and I come out of the hurt of the healing knowing that it’s always the right thing to take our own darkness and find a way to turn it into light, both for ourselves and others.

So, as we make our way in the world, we can remember these lessons. And we don’t have to like it. That’s allowed. But we get to choose what we’re going to do about it and how we’re going to live.

Maybe life is arbitrary. I haven’t the faintest idea. But I look back on the small choices, and it reminds me that every choice we make can have far-reaching effects we can scarcely imagine. I hope that makes me kinder and braver.

I hope that makes you kinder and braver, too.