On Change: Make You some Lemonade

I have been running away from putting this post together. As much as I hate to admit, I am writing this for me first before anyone else.January started rough for me because the sight of having your good friend on drips in a small hospital bed isn’t exactly the kind of New Year photograph you want to have framed on the wall. The season was so blurry I forgot to make resolutions. I mean, in my mind, I knew there were a few things I wanted to work on, some habits I had waited 365 days to get rid of because well- you know how these things are- we always wait for January.Fast forward almost two months now and I am exactly at the place I was hoping to move away from. If you know me, you know I am a routine person. Manuals and recipes and Google maps were made for people like me. Give a guideline, a pattern, some kind structured system and I’m good to go. Which means, I am a complete wreck when there is a shift in the order of things. And I have been dealing with that shift for about four months now and this has just been a  sad sad story.I am schooling and working at the same time. I know, I know. This is nothing. People do this all the time. People work three jobs and attend a short course class in the middle of the night. I know. I get that. But this is me and this kind of living is hard and I am going to write about it because I can. Let’s just say I am sleeping less than five hours and my eating habits aren’t exactly hitting a great score and I literally go through each week wishing the week away- counting down to a weekend which seems to only want to last for a minute.This is a problem because this is new to me and I have never been one to spread my arms open, waiting to embrace change.Sometimes change can be the hardest thing because how do you take off a life you know, put it down and pick up another one like it never existed. We are a generation that likes to get accustomed to things. We like to become familiar, to get so comfortable. We put down our bags and rest. We like the pattern in knowing that we when  we open a door, there will be a  floor that we can land our feet on after taking a step- because that’s just how things have always been.Last week, at the back of an empty lecture hall, my friend and I spoke about change. I was so full of complaints that day- about how tired I was, how I couldn’t make time to study because a two-hour drive home takes the life out of you, how the semester was choking me down and how scared I was that I wouldn’t make it out alive. He told me, “The problem is not the change. The problem is how you’ve chosen to respond to it.” I knew he was right.It is good to have your own survival kit for all the storms you are familiar with, the ones that you have braced before. But here’s the thing with old storms- you learn nothing new. You get hit by the same waves, you get so used to beating the same waters. You get used to surviving the same wars. You stretch your legs and get comfortable.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort or convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.- Luther King

2018 is just starting to sink into our skins and it’s going to be a year of so many things for so many people. But if you happen to have life throw you unto a path that you had never once even dreamt of, I hope out of the million options, you choose the grace of adapting, of accepting that we won’t always have life dressed up like we’ve known it; that sometimes the table will be set differently and if we happen to be given lemons, we won’t throw our hands about whining for apples. I hope out of the million options, you make you some wildest dreams lemonade and drink to the process- just because.