This Too Shall Pass, No One Promised You a Rose Garden, Part 2
What I forgot to mention in yesterday’s post, “No One Promised You a Rose Garden”, is that it does get better.
The bad days, the days that make you question all that you are doing, slowly come less often and are spaced further apart.
The beginning is the most difficult, especially if you are still attached to an old life or old ways of thinking. These periods of transition and can last a few months or a few years.
William Bridges, author of “Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes”,
- “A transition is much more than a change. Change is situational. Transition on the other hand is psychological. It is not those events [relocating, a new job, birth or death], but rather the inner orientation and self-redefinition that you have to go through in order to incorporate any of those changes into your life.”
He goes on further to define the three phases of transition as “(1) an ending, (2) a neutral zone, and (3) a new beginning.”
I have found that the dark days, the difficult times, for me, are most often experienced during times of transition when I am in the neutral zone, the in-between zone.
I have passed through many transitions over the last eighteen months. Most of them were personal, and at times very painful, but were not as visible to the outside world as the current transition phase. But, without the previous periods of growth I would not be where I am today.
My current transition involves moving from employee to self-employed. I feel stuck sometimes. Sometimes I feel things are moving to fast and at others that they are moving to slow. It is all part of the in-between zone, the neutral zone, as I navigate my internal psyche and re-define myself.
We all need to take the time to move through and process the periods of transition. Resistance to, or trying to hurdle past them only slows us down and moves us back to square one. And sometimes our resistance is trying to tell us something. Maybe we haven’t done all of our ‘work’, the ‘inner reorientation’ needed to move on.
A great post about resistance and the work we need to do, the ‘prerequisites’ is by Ken Robert at Mildly Creative, titled “Have You Met Your Goals’ Prerequisites?”
Today, I experience the difficult days less frequently and they are of shorter duration.
One of the main reason this is true is because I have learned to recognize the signs and the triggers that kick starts the ‘darkeness’, the self doubt, fatigue, and anxiety.
For me, the triggers are: spending too many hours in traffic; too many hours doing work that just eats up my time instead of feeding my soul; when I fail to adhere to my daily rituals and practices, like meditating, walking and writing; when I forget to say ‘no’, and fail to honor my need for solitude; and when I forget and compare myself to other people, what they are doing, how talented they are or where they are in their journey.
These are my triggers. It is important to figure out what yours are so that you can watch for them. I am not saying you can avoid them, but you will at least recognize what is going on, know that it is normal and that you need to move through them.
No one promised you (or me) a rose garden, no one said it would be easy, but remember, that this too shall pass. There is an end, a middle and a new beginning.
“This Too Shall Pass”
by Helen Steiner Rice
If I can endure for this minute
Whatever is happening to me,
No matter how heavy my heart is
Or how dark the moment may be-
If I can remain calm and quiet
With all the world crashing about me,
Secure in the knowledge God loves me
When everyone else seems to doubt me-
If I can but keep on believing
What I know in my heart to be true,
That darkness will fade with the morning
And that this will pass away, too-
Then nothing in life can defeat me
For as long as this knowledge remains
I can suffer whatever is happening
For I know God will break all of the chains
That are binding me tight in the darkness
And trying to fill me with fear-
For there is no night without dawning
And I know that my morning is near.
Jenny,
You are very welcome. I, too, love a cup of tea, not only in a crisis. My favorite is English Breakfast Tea.
So happy this post helped you in some small way. Take care.
Sandy
It’s midnight. I can’t sleep because I am thrashing round in bed trying to solve all my problems at once. In the end I gave up telling myself to “just go to sleep” and came downstairs and turned on the computer. I have just read This too shall pass and Helen Steiner Rice’s poem. How often have I said to other people, This too shall pass. A case of physician heal thyself! Yes, all the worries about the day job, the other self-employed job, the health concerns, the money worries will pass and I am now going to have a cup of tea (a very British thing in a crisis!) and go back to bed and…sleep on it. Thank you