The Power of Re-Calculating

I love my GPS; I use it whenever I am going to a new place and it is extremely funny when I don’t follow directions and it is as if the GPS sighs and murmurs to itself because it has to recalculate a new route. You know. create a new normal.

I have come to understand that “new normals” are a part of  life, even if we do not like them. I read Iyanla Vanzant‘s book, Peace from Broken Pieces: How to Get through What you’re Going Through,” and marveled at how many times there has been a “recalculation” in her life and how many times her “normal” has changed.  Another book of hers, The Value in the Valley speaks of the place we find ourselves before we climb up and out of our valleys into a new space…but what is clear is that once in a valley, if we use the valley experience correctly, our lives, upon emerging, will be different. Our inner beings, our personalities, our spirits, will have “recalculated” because our valley experience is meant to be a place where old experiences and thinking patterns and even old relationships are meant to be discarded. There is a better way to get to where we need to be, and it is the valley that we begin to realize that.  We don’t willingly go into valleys. Life takes us there, over and over. It might be a diagnosis of cancer, a death in the family, a divorce, betrayal by a friend, being laid off or being fired …Stuff happens, and when it does, it seems to take us to valleys that we do not want to be in.

So recalculating is always going on in our lives.

I hear that Tony Robbins said that when he had valley experiences in his life, the way he got through them was to pour positive energy – and a lot of it – into work or projects that he believed in.  It is while we are in a valley that we don’t want to do anything – not eat, not read, not even enjoy the beauty of a new day – but when we succumb to the tendency to wallow in the valley, we waste the experience. It is too valuable an experience to be wasted.

Valley experiences are meant to strengthen and encourage us. I have always taught my students the words of Psalm 30: “Weeping endures for a night, but joy comes in the morning!” but have added my own two cents’ worth …”and morning always comes!”  No matter how dark and long the night, morning will push through. The goal should be, while we are in a valley, to make sure than when morning comes, we are not the same as we were when dark descended.  It seems that our spirits cry out to us to let them (our spirits) do their work, to let them reshape, reform, retry, recalculate – so that we can live lives that are optimally meaningful for us.

That’s what our spirits yearn to do, I think.

My spirit is in recalculate mode. I think I’m going to let her do her work.

A candid observation …