A Little Patience and Faith: All We Really Need When We Lose Our Way (and sometimes all we have)

One of the things you can count on in life is the fact of change.

Even when things are going well, like a career or a relationship, either life changes or we change. Or both. And it doesn’t have to mean something went wrong.

We grow out of interests, what matters to us changes, or things just don’t make sense for us anymore.

I had a young client who’d been a very intense athlete, was set to play in college and wanted to play professionally, but simply lost her passion and interest.

She thought it was a sign that she’d be ‘a quitter’ as an adult, that she was lazy, or that she had no confidence or vision.

But as we talked more she mentioned that her friends’ interests changed over the years – school plays, guitar, Minecraft, Star Wars, dating – every year they evolved into a person with different interests.

The only constant was change itself. And yet she didn’t worry about them. She saw that their energy and enthusiasm simply morphed into different things.

She was so relieved I could see it in her face and her posture.

She’d made up a bunch of meaning and implications about herself and her future, and had scared herself. She’d been carrying so much tension and edginess.

She realized that she’d worried that life would stop, and she’d never get another interest. That basketball was her thing, and that was it. There’d be no other life for her.

Years later she reached out and had found a job she loved and all kinds of ideas about her future.

For that young client, the fact that our values and interests change, or that life changes, was not really the problem.

The problem for her was where she went in her reactions, her ideas, and her fears about those changes.

Sometimes realizing we’ve changed, or that it’s time for a change, is a big deal. It means we have to potentially ‘break up’ with a path and the future as we knew it.

That can be unnerving, scary, and disappointing. Insecurity around being in the unknown is a very normal thing. It doesn’t mean you’re doing the wrong thing.

Your mind made up one version of the future, and it gets surprised that suddenly it’s not happening anymore. And you have no idea (yet) where the story goes from there.

It’s no different from a breakup. Most of us have been through them.

The insecurity is unavoidable, and yet we all know that it passes.

After someone’s been through a breakup or two, you learn that a little patience and faith is all we need. While we don’t know what’s on the other side, we know that there IS another side and we learn to trust that.

Humans are connected to a universal intelligence that provides emotional stability and resilience. It’s the same intelligence that creates a surge of new plant life after a forest fire.

The more we trust that there’s a deeper intelligence at work helping us along, the easier it is to find patience and faith.

Whether we’re in high school or 52 like the client in today’s video, having that patience and faith in ourselves and in life is often the only thing we have. And once the dust settles and we get our bearings back, our clarity and sense of direction comes back too.

That’s what today’s video is about.