#Well give off. please dont quit. full#

Whether we are all exactly where we are “supposed” to be-no matter where we are-I don’t know. We are more the same than we are different. And there, in the quiet of the night, with all of her kids sleeping, we sat in awe at the fact that no matter the circumstances of our lives, we are all pretty much asking ourselves the same question, under the surface: am I making the most of this one precious and beautiful life I’ve been given? “I’m kind of jealous, honestly.” I looked at her. Mine is quiet and peaceful and lonely much of the time and my closet is organized by color-for whatever that’s worth.Ī quiet moment came, and that’s when I said it.

#Well give off. please dont quit. full#

Her house is full of crayons and noise and music and sweet little voices and beautiful activity. All I could think was:Īre you kidding me? I couldn’t be any happier.Īfter the kids went to bed we sat on the couch and drank wine and talked about how different our lives were. Then they wanted to snuggle on the couch and watch High School Musical.Īt one point my friend came in the room where I was on the couch with her girls-one of them literally draped over the top of me-and mouthed Thank you to me from the door. Later, her three daughters wanted to read princess books and do dances while I videotaped them. We woke early on a Saturday morning to watch her son play in a peewee football game. I was with a good friend last weekend, spending time with her and her four kids. What if we are exactly where we were always meant to to be? Exactly where you are supposed to be? Suddenly we find ourselves in a place we never expected to be, wondering if and where and how we made such a terribly wrong turn. When the relationship falls apart, or the marriage falls apart, or the business deal falls through or the job falls through or the illness falls over us unexpectedly. It also made me think about how quickly heartbreak takes over when life doesn’t turn out how we plan. Wasn’t that the understatement of the century.īut the whole thing made me think about how much easier it is to handle discouragement when we know we’re not the only ones who feel it, when we realize this is such a normal, human, everyday kind of emotion. “Life just don’t always go the way you plan,” he said. I sat on the floor of my bedroom, nodding in agreement, days away from moving myself, disheveled and surrounded by half-packed cardboard boxes. He said he’d thought a lot about quitting everything and moving somewhere else, but wasn’t sure where to go. He explained how the relationship he’d been in for the past five years had come to an end, and things were “complicated” with his family, and that he was questioning his career path. “To be honest, it’s not going that well.” I asked how he was doing, and since we’ve been friends for more than a decade and he’s not the kind to pull punches, he answered: I was talking on FaceTime to a friend the other day, catching up after a long time of not being in touch.

What’s wrong with me? When life doesn’t go how you planned Where our wires get crossed is when we start wondering: aren’t I too old (or too blessed, or too whatever) to be asking this question? We are wired for challenge and really quite resilient to pain. It reminds me of something I heard Glennon Melton say recently, which is, “it’s not the pain that takes us out of the game, it’s the shame on top of the pain.” In other words, it’s not the hard work of building something that makes us want to quit, and I doubt it’s even the uncertainty of wondering whether our hard work will pay off. But that second question is what does me in. I mean, if it were just the first question, I could probably handle it without wanting to light a match and burn everything to the ground. That second question is really the worse of the two. Shouldn’t you have this figured out by now? My alarm went off and I rolled out of bed to change for my yoga class, but as I did, the sinking feeling came over me. It rolls up next to us at stoplights or comes streaming in through the window with the morning sun. Discouragement is just so normal like that. This time it showed up on Tuesday morning, around 5:40am. Every now and then this feeling comes around-like everything I’m doing is for nothing and I might as well give up.