Talk about your second acts. I thought I had already embarked on my life's "second act" when I gave up teaching teenagers grammar and literature, married the prince of my dreams, boldly became a Texan, and followed my heart to become a professional mental health counselor. The last ten years of my life have been devoted to the end goal: establish my own practice.
And I was good at it, too, folks. Good at counseling, good at promoting my business and attracting clients. However, five years into my private practice, my family got thrown a bit of interesting news: hubby's got a lemon of a liver than will more than likely require a replacement. A quick inventory of resources: financial, emotional, and otherwise, led to the realization that adjustments in family roles might need to be made.
Of course, as all of you have experienced, life's challenges require change. And hence: faced with current circumstances, turns running my own business is not going to be the best thing for the family. Hmm. So, here I go again. I am dismantling my beloved practice that I have grown just as I have my own children in the past five years.
But I'm discovering the more I live with the change, the entrance into this second or third or whatever additional act, everything is right where it needs to be. I find myself relaxing into the idea of new priorities. In fact, I'm actually starting to become more conscious of the aspects of running my own business for which I actually harbored a smoldering resentment. I feel the small thrill of options again.
I like taking the challenge to sow in a different field, too: as a sharecropper's granddaughter, I know sometimes the best way to make a fallow field rich again was to allow it to lie empty for a season. That way, its nutrients could renew. I know in my heart I am not giving up my beloved counseling, just being a small business owner. And I don't have to fear the next act, whatever that is beyond growing my children as best I can while I cast out into the universe.
Life will always throw you change. Some welcome, some not so much. But I've found if I can stay calm in body first, mind follows. And then the charge is to surrender, lean to acceptance of what is unfolding. You are, I am alright. We always have been. We always will be. There's no opposing evidence. So: here's to second, third, and acts beyond and the delight of starring in them with each other.
