"Life is sometimes confusing, often messy and always surprising"

Gateway Women flagged a great article from the Guardian on Facebook recently: "After a miscarriage and divorce, my friends showed me true love" by Elizabeth Day.  A couple of choice quotes that rang particularly true to me:

When you’re younger, you assume life will turn out a particular way because you haven’t lived it yet. It sometimes strikes me that getting older is a gradual erasure of the nonchalant confidence that comes with that naivety.

And:

When my marriage ended, I realised that another kind of life existed. It was one in which I got to know myself a lot better and where there was freedom in choosing not to conform. For a long time, I felt I had failed to be a wife and failed to be a mother, and that these things spoke badly of me as a person. I had tried so hard to put a positive gloss on things and keep going that I was ashamed when this facade crumbled.

And:

These days, I’m more comfortable with the realisation that I don’t know how the future will pan out. I’ve learned that life is sometimes confusing, often messy and always surprising. To pretend otherwise is to kid yourself you have control, and that means you can’t possibly hope to experience anything authentically. If you’re trying to shape what happens next, you are probably not paying enough attention to what’s happening right now.

Read the whole thing, here.