Make The Best of It

I love when a phrase grabs my attention and makes me stop and process it. The one I recently read was something like “Let every situation be what it is and not what you think it should be. Then make the best of it.”  If that’s not the truth, I don’t know what is! We do not always get to decide things, but we sure do a lot to try to control and influence the decision anyway.

I’m noticing that as we are raising our youngest child, currently 11 years old, I find myself much more willing to go with the punches and not get worked up when things go a different way than I had planned. When I was a parent in my 20’s and 30’s I would have wanted things to always go a certain way, as if I was the director in control of a movie shoot.

Realizing that life is not perfect and those imperfect moments add just as much value as the perfect ones in our growth has allowed me to gain a fresh perspective. Now I will admit that I love when things go the way I planned, of course. I enjoy planning a trip down to the specific details of each day and seeing it all come together. There is joy in that for me. But some of the most beautiful times on trips have come out of unplanned events. I have to say it’s hard for me to be spontaneous but I do like for the surprises in life to come along and catch me off guard when I have no other choice.

Our youngest daughter (Jozie, 11) keeps us laughing because she still shows her silly side and doesn’t care much about what others think. I’m sure the day will come when she enters her teenage years and loses that silliness, but for now I’m appreciating it so much. She’s being raised like an only child because her siblings are almost 18 and 21.

I credit her older siblings with keeping things light with her and looking out for her. She got a pretty thorough safety net surrounding her where family is concerned. In this life there can be such seriousness to everything. I’d hope that every parent tries to preserve the innocence and protect their child as much as possible while letting them feel disappointments and learn how to move on easily.

Making the best out of the situation and letting it just be what it is might just be one of the keys to being content in this life. It’s definitely not an excuse to stand by and let life pass you by, but just as the phrase says it’s about making the best out of the situation. Whether that means being aware enough to see when it’s time to make a change or to make a move when an environment no longer suits you, the idea is to keep moving forward and not let things we can’t control pull us down.

I’m no different than you in the fact I’ve had situations that were out of my control and I just couldn’t see why my version of what should happen wasn’t how it ultimately went. But now I can say that every one of those situations really was for the best and I am able to look back with appreciation and leave them in the past.