When the Fertilizer Hits the Rotating Air-Pusher

Unique Commonalities:  When the Fertilizer Hits the Rotating Air-Pusher

I was reading the other day that on the average, each person experiences between two and three significant life changes (as self-reported) during the course of a year.  That is an astounding figure to me.  Yet, looking back on my own life, I must admit that it is probably not that far off.

What is a significant life change?  It is any change in socioeconomic, physical, emotional or spiritual status, which requires significant changes in behavior, thoughts, beliefs, and perspective, which impacts, to some degree, other areas of life.

Yes, it is a mouthful.   Yet, you can simply define a significant life change event by how you initially respond to it.  Usually, the greater the outcry, “The Fertilizer has Hit the Rotating Air-Pusher!” or “Holy Manure!” and such similar things usually indicate that you have just experienced such a life change.  The more you think about it afterward and the more stress it initially generates is also a great indicator.

One common characteristic of a SLC (Significant Life Change) is that there is a shift.  It can usually be felt.  The shift can be in the speed of your thoughts, the depth of your emotion, the sudden change in perspective and priorities.  In each of these responses there is a time, a moment, to manage better the affects of the change.

When an SLC occurs, oftentimes your thoughts speed up and start processing all the aspects, real and imagined, of the change.  This often happens before the emotions kick in.  If left ungoverned, these thoughts can trigger the emotional reaction of PANIC.  Yet, at the outset, you can govern some of these thoughts. 

It takes a decision to start thinking not around or about the issue, the change, but to start looking at it’s cause, it’s degree, and most importantly, at your response to it.  Think one thought and then think another.  If you find yourself dwelling only on the cause of the change, you become trapped in your own mind.  If you focus only on the degree, you promote stress, anxiety and fear.   Your mind will try to analyze it.  Your job is to analyze it in a way that focuses on solutions; not necessarily solving the change, but providing yourself some solutions in addressing it.

At some point, whether governing your thoughts or not, the emotions will come into play.  The shift in emotions might feel exhilarating, or scary or both.  You may find your emotions going as fast as your thoughts did.  You may even go through the entire spectrum of your emotional repertoire in the space of a couple of minutes.  Emotions are ok to experience.  Yet, just like thoughts, if they dwell in fear, anxiety, apathy, anger or frustration for a long time, they can do damage.  They can prime you to experience those emotions more and more while going through this Significant Life Change.   Yet, unlike the fast thoughts, emotions will need to be experienced to a point.  Immediately bottling up frustration or anger will cause those to come out in non-beneficial or destructive ways later on.  Managing the shift in emotions is more about recognizing them, their validity, and setting a time in which they can be experienced. If the life change is good, there needs to be time to celebrate.  If there is a negative life change, there needs to be time to mourn, to grieve.  If the change is confrontational and threatening, anger, for a time, is perfectly appropriate.  You can howl at the moon.  Get it out.  Just don’t make a habit of that.  Do not let any one emotion create habits in your behavior that may complicate addressing the life change(s) that have happened. 

Once the mind and emotions have spoken, and sometime during, there is a change in perspectives that happen during a Significant Life Change.  Up until the change, you had priorities in your life:  paying your bills, going to work, looking for work, being a parent, or family member, taking care of finances, education, scheduling social events, etc.  We all do this.  We all have an unspoken list of priorities, labeled from most important to least.  We all get a little frustrated when we have to re-prioritize these.   Yet, the SLC does more than force us to reprioritize; it forces a whole new system on us.  New items suddenly appear which trump in importance anything else on our everyday list.  If the change involved financial hardship, suddenly there is a survival priority written that puts the most necessary items on top.  If the change is physical, new priorities in health and healing, body image or body survival are created. 

This is the stage where we do a reality check on our priorities.  We do have some choice on what gets prioritized.   Survival needs usually are prioritized first.  Even positive life changes cause needs to be prioritized.  Yet, when we are reordering that list, watch out for those priorities, which no longer serve a purpose under the new change.  For example, if you are in a car wreck and your car is totaled, one of your priorities that no longer work as well is that priority to continue to put $300 away on that future Hawaii vacation.  Other things take precedence.   Emotional priorities are even more difficult to tell which are still valid and which are not.  If you break up with someone or are the recipient of the breakup, the emotional priority to spend time with your special someone is no longer valid.  Yet, if we keep that in the forefront of the priority list, it will cause more frustration, pain, and loss.

When a Significant Life Change occurs, you will think thousands of thoughts; you will feel thousands of emotions, or some emotions a thousand times, and your perspective and priorities will change.  These things will happen.  Managing SLC’s and their negative effects include managing each of these shifts.   Don’t worry.  It gets easier (most of the time) with every SLC experienced.