And Then Life Changes

And when it does, keep living.

Today, artificial intelligence is changing our world at a breathtaking pace.

Tomorrow it will be something else.

But perhaps we give technology too much credit for introducing us to change.

Life has been doing that forever.

Relationships. Heartbreak. Betrayal. Disappointment. Joy. Illness. Recovery. Birth. Death. Falling in love. Falling out of love. Becoming a parent. Losing a parent. Discovering something about another person that changes everything you thought you knew.

The details change.

The human assignment really doesn’t.

We are continually being asked to take in new information and decide what to do with it.

Perhaps that is why I have been thinking about rejection lately.

There are many forms of rejection, of course, and almost all of them can hurt.

Harvard can reject you.

A medical school can reject you.

An employer can decide someone else is better suited for the job.

You can train for months, perhaps years, and still not make the team.

Those experiences can be devastating. They can shake our confidence and make us question abilities we had previously trusted.

But most of them contain an important psychological escape hatch:

There may be another door.

Another university can educate you.

Another medical school can train you.

Another employer can recognize your talent.

Another team can give you a place to play.

Romantic love contains a much more vulnerable proposition:

I choose you. Will you choose me?

Sometimes the answer is no.

And sometimes, perhaps even more painfully, the answer is yes.

Until one day it isn’t.

You settle into being loved. You allow another human being access to the parts of yourself you protect from most of the world. You begin constructing a future—not necessarily deliberately, but quietly.

Next Christmas.

Next summer.

Someday.

Home.

Family.

Growing old.

And then something changes.

Sometimes they stop choosing you.

Sometimes they choose someone else.

Sometimes there is betrayal followed by reconciliation, and although the relationship survives, something inside it has changed. A question has entered the room that wasn’t there before.

Are you really here with me?

That question can follow people into the most intimate moments of their lives.

Holding hands.

Walking together.

Kissing.

Lying beside one another in the dark.

Those are the moments when, if we are fortunate, we stop performing for the world. The walls come down. We expose not only our bodies, but our desires, fears, insecurities, hopes and imagination.

And I think most of us want something remarkably simple in those moments:

I want to know that when you are here with me, you want to be here with me.

Not because I was the sensible choice.

Not because leaving would have been complicated.

Not because enough years had accumulated that staying seemed easier.

Not because the person you really wanted was unavailable.

I don’t want to compete with a fantasy living inside the mind of the person lying beside me.

I want to be part of the fantasy.

Perhaps that sounds idealistic.

I’m okay with that.

Because love itself is a little unreasonable.

We love who we love.

It doesn’t always make sense to the outside world, and it doesn’t have to.

We should be free to love the people we love without requiring everyone else to understand why.

And perhaps that explains why romantic rejection can feel fundamentally different from other forms of rejection.

When Harvard rejects us, we wanted an education.

When an employer rejects us, we wanted an opportunity.

But when someone we love rejects us, we weren’t necessarily looking for a partner.

We wanted that person.

And with that person, we may have wanted a particular life.

That is why heartbreak can feel less like losing someone and more like losing a future.

Sometimes I think what takes us longest to grieve isn’t even the person.

It is the life we quietly constructed around who we believed that person to be.

And there is another complication.

Sometimes the person we loved really did exist exactly as we understood them.

Until they changed.

Sometimes we misunderstood them from the beginning.

Sometimes they misunderstood themselves.

Sometimes we simply learn something we didn’t know before.

New information arrives.

And reality changes.

Or perhaps reality didn’t change at all.

Perhaps only our understanding of it did.

Either way, the human response is remarkably predictable.

We resist it.

We negotiate with it.

We replay old conversations.

We search for explanations.

We romanticize what existed before.

We wonder whether we could somehow put everything back where it was.

But eventually life asks us to make a choice:

Will we adapt to the world that actually exists, or exhaust ourselves trying to recreate one that doesn’t?

That question extends far beyond relationships.

A diagnosis can ask it.

A death can ask it.

A child growing up and leaving home can ask it.

A career ending can ask it.

A friendship changing can ask it.

A body aging can ask it.

Technology can ask it.

Life asks it over and over again.

And maybe that is the part we shouldn’t fear quite so much.

Change isn’t evidence that life has gone wrong.

Change is life.

The tide comes in.

The tide goes out.

There are waves gentle enough to float upon and others strong enough to knock us down.

There are storms.

There are astonishingly beautiful mornings after them.

And somehow we are equipped to keep moving with the water.

Not unchanged.

But still ourselves.

Perhaps wiser.

Perhaps softer.

Perhaps stronger in places we didn’t know needed strengthening.

And occasionally brave enough to admit that something we desperately wanted is no longer what we want at all.

We get one life.

At least this version of it.

It isn’t a dress rehearsal.

Of course we can outgrow the life we have been living. We can decide to make it different, bigger, quieter, simpler, more adventurous or entirely our own.

But it is still the same life.

Ours.

And none of us knows how much of it remains.

So perhaps we should stop being quite so afraid to live it.

Stop allowing other people to define what happiness is supposed to look like.

Stop wondering who gets to decide what is normal.

Because the answer is wonderfully simple:

You do.

You get to decide what is enough.

You get to decide what brings you peace.

You get to decide whom you love.

You get to decide when forgiveness feels right.

You get to decide when something can be rebuilt.

And you get to decide when broken glass is simply broken glass and walking away from the pieces is not failure.

It is acceptance.

You cannot always choose what happens to you.

You cannot make another person choose you.

You cannot prevent every heartbreak, betrayal, illness, death, disappointment or storm.

But you do get some say in what happens next.

So learn everything you can.

Remain endlessly curious.

Change your mind when new information deserves a new conclusion.

Love people generously without believing that loving them requires abandoning yourself.

Teach what you know, even if the only person watching is a child who may someday remember how you lived.

Spread kindness rather than cruelty.

Leave people with more grace than you found them carrying.

And when life changes—and it will—allow yourself to change with it.

Because perhaps the goal was never to build a life so perfect that nothing could disturb it.

Perhaps the goal is to build a self capable of meeting whatever comes.

The changing tides.

The waves.

The storms.

And, thank goodness, all that extraordinary beauty in between.

With gratitude for what was, joy for what is, and a wide-open heart for whatever comes next.

🍯 Honey 🐝