What happens when your life is beyond your control?
When life doesn’t go as planned?
When your reality falls short of your fantasy?
Maybe you’ve always dreamed of a perfect job where you get to travel the world, eat wonderful food, meet wonderful people and do work that you feel passionately about every day.
Or maybe you’ve dreamed of the most wonderful partner to share your life with…one who loves you so deeply that he or she would take a bullet for you, or more simply have breakfast brought to you in bed. Maybe you’ve envisioned their fantastic sense of humor, their charm, their intelligence, their dashingly good looks, their professional success and their easy-to-get-along with nature that makes conflict almost impossible.
Then… reality happens.
You find a great job, but it’s not quite as you imagined. You get to travel, but maybe not to exotic places and it only allows you a small budget for meals. Maybe it’s work that you like, some of the time, but find boring or unfulfilling other parts of the time.
Maybe you find a wonderful partner, but you don’t walk off into the sunset with them happily ever after. Maybe they lovingly support you most of the time, they show they care about you very deeply, but in some way they don’t match up identically to the fantasy that you’ve created in your mind over the course of your life.
And now here you are in a job you like (but don’t love) and in a relationship that works well, but isn’t matching with the dream of near-perfection that you always had.
Most people feel a sense of frustration, loss, grief, or even shame and embarrassment about the gap between the fantasy they created and the reality that they have chosen. Remember that worrying will not change the outcome. They may not even realize that they are dissatisfied because their fantasy and their reality are disparate.
Nothing is perfect. Nothing is pure.
Wonderful jobs always have some drudge work or a boss you don’t like or an environment that isn’t like ideal. Great relationships have hiccups and bumps and sometimes mountains to climb. It’s these imperfections and challenges that help us to grow, even though they often aren’t pleasant. Learn to let things you cannot control go.
It’s important to remember that crafting fantasies are a normal part of being human and serve us well in many ways. It’s fun to use the creativity of your mind to experience something beyond your current scope of reality. If you’ve ever enjoyed a movie, then you know how much fun it can be to lose yourself in a world that is made up.
Here are some tools for moving through this gap with grace (and sometimes stumbling, less than gracefully). It helps to use each tool in the order listed below.
It may seem that I’m saying “you can’t have it all!” But, I’m actually saying – you can have it all and appreciate your life so much more. “All” may need to be redefined as a chance to be all that you are in imperfect circumstances (because this is reality!).
