Sometimes things don’t go as planned. Divorce, death, job loss, break-ups, illness, insecurity, and anxiety plague us all. These things happen. To the best of people. They do. But even if we planned to stay married to our childhood sweethearts forever, and that we would mature and grow in perfect harmony at the same rate and die in each other’s arms at a ripe old age, sometimes that isn’t the way the story unfolds. Sometimes we get sick in awful, maybe crippling, ways. Sometimes we lose our jobs and are afraid. Sometimes the person we thought was the one breaks our heart.

It is tempting to cling to that perfect vision we had for our lives and get stuck. Instead of gathering ourselves up, we keep trying to perfect the past. We rage; we shut off; we lose ourselves in denial. We go over and over what went wrong and wish and pray for that to change. Somehow. We want to go back to when the hurt was still unknown in our futures rather than spend time where that hurt is all to well-known and debilitating in our presents.

But today is a new day. When we accept the lives we have rather than mourn the ones we hoped for, the promise of that new day whispers all about us. We can gather ourselves up– broken heart, broken wings, and all– and take flight.