During my early morning ponderings, I’ve come to a rather enlightening (and quite obvious) conclusion: Life is exceedingly full of change and transitions and therefore I must find a way to deal with them faster.

The last year and a half I’ve been working at learning how to embrace change instead of fighting it – to learn how to not just accept change, but eventually get excited about it. It’s not easy, and I fail quite often, but at least I’m on the right track and when I catch myself beginning to get uptight about change I remind myself to relax and go with the flow.

I spend my time leading up to a transition asking a lot of questions, feeling out the situation, praying about it, and preparing the best I can so that when the change takes place I’m ready to enter a new routine.

Changes have gotten a lot smoother for me as I follow that method. And that’s a good thing because the last two and a half years of my life have been full of non-stop change. Many of my family members have moved during that time, two of my sisters got married, I moved out of state and started a completely new life…the list goes on.

Recently it hit me that January is the only month in the last year when I didn’t feel like I was having change thrown at me from all directions – the only time when I could focus on the moment, on life, and on making sure my life is on track.

So much of my time is spent playing catch up and learning new routines. I get used to one aspect of life only to look up and find that another change is looming ahead of me and I scramble to prepare for more changes.

Y’all, I literally wrote my birthday thank you notes in January – my birthday is at the end of September. This isn’t because I forgot about writing them, no, I thought about them on a regular basis. This is because all my brain power felt like it was being used up on focusing on the day to day, change, and learning new routines.

January was an absolutely amazing month. Work was slower and there were no new changes, so I got caught up on tons of things. I felt like I was thriving. It was delightful and I felt like everything in life was falling into place. Then the second week of February hit me with another load of change and all at once I was in the mire again – focusing and learning more than thriving and doing.

And thus the pondering – the solution hunting – began.

I’m pretty happy with how I’m learning to deal with change. I just need to figure out a way to expedite the process, because at the rate I’m going I’ll nearly alwasy be in Mire-Mode, slogging through change and missing the feeling of freedom that accompanies thriving in the normal.

The other day I suddenly imagined myself as a mom barely getting used to having a baby before I have to get used to toddler mode, and that trend continuing for the rest of my life. Not cool, right?

Nowadays when I think about change, I also think and pray about how I can learn to get used to change faster. How I can process it in a healthy, but quick, way. How I can find routines that are versatile enough to sway with the ebb and flow of change, but solid enough to help my routine-loving soul thrive.

How are some ways that you deal with getting used to change faster?