Making It Right

Many of you know that I participate in a weekly blog carnival called Six Word Fridays, in which the organizer gives us a topic to write about.  This week the topic was “right.”  Melissa always picks a word that has several meanings, but this one really got to me because I had so much that I wanted to say.  You can check out what I did with it here, but now that I am freed of the six-word constraint, I want to share some of my thoughts with you.

This week a reader wrote me an e-mail asking me how I did it (presumably get a peaceful divorce).  She and her husband had just recently separated after fourteen years together, and she wanted to be friends with him but was also feeling a lot of anger.  She asked me to tell her that it was a process and that she would get there.

Her question made me wonder where “there” was.  It’s interesting how we often think that life is linear and that we will arrive at some better point at which time we will get something right.  Four years after my breakup I have a peaceful and loving relationship with my ex, but it certainly isn’t static.  There is no “Peaceful Divorcee” plaque that I can hang on my wall to admire.  While I am certainly pleased and grateful for the progress we have made and the relationship that we have forged, it is still an ongoing process.  Just a few weeks ago, I posted a piece in which I admitted that I got so angry at my ex that I considered abandoning our friendship and taking the hostile and resentful route.  Fortunately I was able to remember that my love for him is stronger than my anger, but it was a reminder to me that peace still takes effort and that we will never get it just right.  We will always be learning how to treat each other and deal with our frustrations and conflicts in a more productive manner.

As I said yesterday, I don’t think that the purpose of life is to “get it right.”  In fact, the desire to do so can put so much added pressure on us that we enjoy life even less.  One of my favorite blogs, The Happiness Project, recently interviewed Alina Tugend, the author of a new book that sounds really intriguing called Better by Mistake: The Unexpected Benefits of Being Wrong.  In this book she discovered that when people get caught up in blaming themselves for their errors, they fail to gain the benefits of learning from them.  She posits that we are happier when we admit that perfection is a myth and we learn to forgive ourselves and others for our mistakes.

This post came at an appropriate time for me because recently I have been fretting a bit over the past and wondering if my ex and I had made the right decisions in our lives.  Ironically, three years ago I accepted my current position because they led me to believe that it could last forever (yes they used that term).  It actually paid less per course than my previous one but I thought that the long-term benefits of job security would pay off.  Well, the economic downturn hit academia hard, and our college got a new president and eliminated my position.  I briefly engaged in anger, pity, and self-questioning, and then realized that none of that would help.  I made the best decision that I could at the time based on the information that I had.  In addition, I have acquired some new job skills at this current job that I didn’t have before, making me more marketable as I search for a new job.

This feeling of economic insecurity also made me question my divorce.  I wondered how things would have turned out if we had stayed together (presumably we would be financially better off).  Even though my ex was the one to initiate the split, I found myself wondering if I should have tried to get back together years later.  Yet, just as I saw the benefit of the job that I just lost, I also see the upsides of my divorce.  There is no way that I can adequately sum up all of the lessons that I have learned about myself and others, the wisdom and self-confidence that I have gained, the happiness that I feel in my heart now, all because of the process of self-reflection that came with my divorce.

So here we go again looking for new jobs, my ex and I (and his girlfriend).  We will undoubtedly have lots of exciting and perhaps difficult decisions to make in the coming months, and I know that some of them will be right and some of them may be wrong.  But if I remember that I will learn from my mistakes, then I will always come out on top.

Maybe, then, getting it right is more a matter of making it right.  Sometimes you just have to make a decision, and then  make the decision right, in other words, make it work for you.  As I face a time of uncertainty in which I am going to be making some life-changing decisions, I am not going to ask myself, Is this the right way for me to proceed?  Instead I will ask myself, How can I make this right?

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Have you ever made a “mistake” that turned out great?  Do share…

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