So I guess now is as good of a time as any to admit to being a closeted control freak.

With a new job comes that moment or moments as I seem to be having many of them, when you realize that you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing at the exact right moment. I really loved my job. Really. I loved the people I worked with. I loved the people that I talked to on an everyday basis. I loved having a job where I felt like I was making people’s lives better by what I was sharing with them. I loved getting up and going into work in the morning, even when I knew that it was going to be a day when I could never possibly get everything done. As I’m going on month 2 in this new position, I’m also discovering something else I really loved about my position. I loved being in control. This is a strange discovery for me. I have never thought of myself as a control freak or really even someone who enjoyed being in charge. Apparently I hid these qualities so well, I even overlooked them in myself. When I was in my old position, I set up and executed every step. Doing so ensured that the level of quality was where I wanted it to be as well. If it wasn’t good enough, the only person to blame was myself and I had to recognize that and fix it. It’s just not quite that simple in this new job. I think one of the biggest lessons I’m going to learn in PR is that you’re never in control. Even when you feel like you’re in control, there are a million things going on along the sidelines that could totally derail where you were planning to go.

I don’t think that this discovery in myself and this change of career at this point in my life is by chance. Really I don’t often think things happen by chance. I think our decisions are constantly shaping where we’re going to end up. I think more than anything else, at this point in my life, I need to realize I’m not in control. I need to stop trying to be in control. I need to just let life happen around me. My views on God have changed a lot in the last several years. The way I love people has changed, the way I view the “church” has changed, the way I view Jesus has changed. The one thing I’ve tried hard not to change is my desire to not control the important things in my life. The more control I’ve tried to impose on life around me, the more I seem to get lost in the details. Not that the details don’t matter. They matter a lot, but all I can do is my part and then learn how to adapt to how my part changes and shifts into something else. That’s what I want my life to look like. The difficult part is getting there. I guess it’s no coincidence that the getting there is actually the most important part.

And then all of a sudden life changes, and things don’t look the same anymore. The landscape is different. You’re crossing bridges and state lines and the cornfields are gone. The coffee tastes different. The people seem distant. I guess you’re starting over.

I realized that I could become whatever I wanted to be in this change. I could either find myself here or I could hide myself here. Finding is a lot more difficult than hiding. But then again, I guess it’s not supposed to be easy. One of my very best friends shared a quote with me as I was packing up to leave Indiana. “Bloom where you’re planted.” Maybe it really is that simple. I’m nearing the end of what has easily been the most difficult year of my life. I’ve had to face things that make my chest ache to even think about. And these things changed me. Tragedy creates such a strange dichotomy. There’s the part of you that wants to love recklessly because you never know how much time you’ll have. Then there’s the part of you that wants to shrink into the smallest version of yourself you possibly can in hopes that maybe life won’t leave you so raw. If I’m being honest, I’m not past that yet. I’m not ready to go back to loving recklessly. It looks different after you lose someone. It looks different when you see that your parents are not ageless like they seem in our minds. It looks different when the people you love most are hurting in ways you can never begin to fathom. “I don’t know nothing except change will come. Year after year what we do is undone. Time gets moving from a crawl to a run. I wonder if we’re ever gonna ever get home.” I guess it’s a lot less about where we’re going and a lot more about how we get there. So tomorrow I’ll get out of bed and I’ll try to love someone just a little bit more. When it comes down to it, I guess that’s all that matters.