Have you had experiences that were out of the ordinary, left of centre, totally unexpected, that changed your life for better or for worse…or just changed the course of your life so much that it doesn’t feel real?

Something happens out of the blue.  An opportunity, an event, something so profound that even if it is a positive thing, it throws you off kilter.

What do you do, how do you cope? How do you maintain equilibrium so that you can move ahead?

No, I am not going to preach today and just say “so… do yoga”.  That’s not the point of this post. It’s more of an… outpour of rambling thoughts as I face this new year with hope, curiosity, some trepidation of what it may hold.

We are humans, and even if your personality is such that you always seek out the new, we do tend to find some comfort in routines, in what is comfortable and what we can understand. But life isn’t always like that.  It can throw curve balls at us when we least expect it to.  Or, even if we were expecting something, when it finally arrives it frightens us just because it is so new, so different.  Fear of the unknown, the inexplicable.

Then we often over analyse, trying to work it out, instead of just accepting and going with the flow. Or at least, some of us do.  Others are able to just let things happen, without judgment, without prejudice, without doubts which can later cloud the experience. If you are like me, then you think too much, scared of making the wrong choice, of stepping into the unknown, of being hurt.

Is it better, do you think, to break things down, to fully understand a situation in order to make the best of it or to sail through it with confidence?  Or is it better to let go and let things just happen – because life is a mystery after all?

My “day job” is as a business analyst.  It is my job, my duty, to analyse, to determine if something is feasible, worthwhile and can be done / created with as few flaws as possible, preferably with no stones unturned as to what may happen. OK, that works well for developing a piece of software that is a collection of binaries defined by a set algorithm of “if this, then that, or else”.

But if I try to apply that to life… nope, just doesn’t compute in the same way.  Logic doesn’t seem to apply. Maybe something like the chaos theory can explain things. Butterfly flapping its wings somewhere causing a storm elsewhere…

Que sera, sera. Sometimes you just can’t understand or take control.  The best you can do is to try to have an accepting mindset of whatever may eventuate; to have an open mind and innocent curiosity for whatever may come. Probably easier said than done. But I’m going to open my wings and step off the ledge. Otherwise, I’ll never know, and THAT I will regret.