A little while ago a friend was sharing a tough day and said how given my husband passing that I had experience with adversity.  I took a second to ponder that and said I had been reacting to challenging situations a similar way for a long time.  That I go with the Flow.  So much of life is deciding whether to go with the Flow or against it.  That is how I see it at least.

In the days following I gave some more thought to it.  I was a dramatic teenage girl, maybe not as much as other girls, but dramatic all the same.  I knew I hadn’t always gone with the Flow.  I cruised my memory, trying to figure out when I went from fighting the Flow to going with it.  I thought maybe it’s a bit genetic, that it’s just my makeup and over time I’ve honed it? I don’t know whether there is any truth to that, but what I did come to realize was that it mostly started happening about 16 years ago when I was diagnosed with Relapse and Remitting MS. The diagnosis came at a time when I had a toddler and a three month old.  I was told one of the ways to reduce the chance of relapsing was to get plenty of sleep and to reduce my stress.  With a small baby and a toddler needing to be cared for getting rest wasn’t something I had control over, stress on the other hand was.  That’s when it started….going with the Flow.  It wasn’t something I chose to do, it just was something I was pretty much forced to do.  After a while I think it became easier and easier.  I had a few major events that happened after my diagnosis and I had to learn to handle the stress that came along with them.  Was I perfect? No.  Did I get stressed?  Most definitely.

Last week I was dealt with another event and from it’s aftermath I have come to view going with the Flow a little differently.  It became apparent that part of going with the Flow is perspective.  Our experiences colour our perspective.  My perspective is bound to be very different than someone that hasn’t experienced living with MS and my perspective will be different than someone that has MS because of witnessing FTD slowly take my husband away from us.  It truly is perspective.  We can all learn to go with the Flow.  It takes keeping things in perspective and recognizing that going with the Flow requires acknowledging that we don’t have control.  Grasping for control is the opposite of going with the Flow.  Ultimately, if there is anything I have learned over the last decade or so it is that we don’t have control over much of anything.

That leads to my mantra of late:  CG2F – Couldn’t Give 2 Fucks.  There is very, very little that I care about these days that can move me out of the Flow.  Don’t get me wrong I care….deeply.  I just choose to view it through my lens – my perspective.  The majority of the time my worries are folded into paper planes and turned into flying fucks.