Life detours

Life detours are similar to road detours. They take you through shortcuts, around obstacles, through obstacles and are supposed to keep you safe from the rough patches and dangers that lie on your normal, daily travels. They aren't always the shortest or preferred route to your perceived goal either. Some people say that you should always leave it in the hands of your higher power. But it's up to you how you decipher the detour. Has it been put there to make you change your way of doing things? Is it just an obstacle to teach you a lesson? Is it protecting you from yourself and some misguided thought process? Or maybe it's just a practical joke, sprung on you from some bet the higher beings (whomever they are) thought up during a poker game one night. No one knows and you can spend valuable time trying to figure it out. The best course of action in my mind aside from just handing it over, is to learn from the detours. Take the gift and use it to your advantage. Just like taking a road detour, apply some critical thinking on how you'll make the best of the re-routing.
We moved our shop because we had come to a fork in the road. One way was continuing on the the same path we had always gone, full of unknowns, rough patches and dangerous road blocks to be sure, and we have chosen the fork in the road that seems still to be full of unknowns and as in anything in life, will have rough patches, but I think we have avoided the dangerous road blocks. For awhile.
Life detours also come when you least expect them. For us, it was an accident my Mother suffered a week ago. She fell and broke her hip. This was traumatic for her and my dad. My dad has the onset of dementia so it has been a struggle for him to always understand why we are taking the place of my mother with his care-giving while she is being cared for at the rehab. For her, it is a struggle to relinquish his care to us as well as the worry of how much things will change in their lives when she gets home, or if it will at all.  It is a new journey for all of us, that's for sure, but it just shows how strong and close our family really is. We take turns with the care giving and it's working well. Takes a village as my Mother always says. It's true. Helps to have a morbid or warped sense of humor as well.

"Don't forget that you are human.

 It's okay to have a melt down. Just don't unpack and live there.

 Cry it out and then refocus on where you are headed."