"Defer the lead, enjoy the ride..."

Most of us are probably pretty good at making sure things happen as we want them to happen in our lives. We are good at accomplishing what we need to accomplish - and even more than we need to accomplish - and we are good at knowing what others need to accomplish, too. We know how to lead. Especially, we know how to lead ourselves.
Or so we think. At a particularly changing time in my life, a wise friend said, at just the right moment: "Defer the lead, enjoy the ride." That bit of wisdom has served me well, many, many times.

The truth is, we are not completely in control of what happens in our own life or in someone else's life. If we think that we are completely in control, we are in denial about what life really is. Life is constantly changing; we change, others change, what seemed good yesterday doesn't seem as good today, children grow up, lovers leave or they die, the work we thought was so important suddenly becomes unimportant, to ourselves or to others. Life is constantly changing. What we do or do not do is not as important as our willingness to trust life on life's terms.

I don't know about you, but I was raised to lead. I learned how to be responsible. I learned that what I said and how I said it made a difference. At a certain age, however, life gave me a wonderful, wonderful lesson: Sometimes, no matter what I do, things just aren't going to go the way I think they should or the way I want them to go.

That's when I moved, just a bit, from the front seat of the tandem bicycle to the back seat. When I first learned to ride tandem, I got very nervous riding in back, because I couldn't control exactly where the ride would go every moment. After awhile, though, I started to notice a few things about riding in back: I didn't have to work as hard, I didn't have to be "on" every single moment, and I didn't have to be vigilant about making sure the ride was perfect.

Whew! That's when I started to enjoy the ride...

Warmly,
meb