Change is good and lying in an emotionally broken pile on your floor is empowering.

That’s right, I said empowering.  Think about this for a moment.

Think about that feeling you get when you are facing a major crisis in your life: a divorce, a breakup, a lost job, a child leaving home to start their own life or the loss of a parent.  Every little emotion is suddenly magnified into something formidable and frightening and you just don’t know what to do.

Come on, yes you do. We all do.

So you find yourself collapsed in a molten puddle on your bedroom floor unable to move, unable to get past your feelings, desperately searching for some sign of normality in old television shows, or your social media newsfeed or in old letters, yet finding nothing there to comfort you?

It is that broken state that rips apart all the things in our lives.  Not just the good, although that is what we concentrate on at that moment in the floor, but the bad as well.  It rips us out of the toxic routines of our life and gives us the chance to break free of repeating the same old behaviors and connections over and over again.

It is in this moment, in this pile on this floor, you are more powerful than you’ve ever been.

The thing about going through unexpected or terrifying or sad changes is that one of the things you lose is your future. You lose your outlook and expectation of what your life was going to become. When you lose that job or that companion or that person, that future fades away right in front of you

And of course, this is petrifying.

And it is why you wind up on the floor, paralyzed with fear, unable to even contemplate let alone actually embrace the daunting process of trying something new and unfathomable.

Here is the empowering part: Now you get to make a choice.

Broken, in pieces, slumped on the floor, with no idea how to go forward, your old expectations of your future have no meaning. Your stories about the past no longer apply. You are in flux, you are changing, you are growing in a new way, and this is an incredibly wonderful opportunity to become new again.

That feeling of confusion and brokenness and fear and sadness that we have all felt at some time or another in our lives is actually a source of beauty and color and new reflections and possibilities. Think of yourself as a prism. All the places where you’ve shattered can now reflect light and color where there was none. Now is the time to become something new, to choose a new whole.

Or think of yourself as a butterfly leaving the safety of the cocoon to morph and shape and evolve, to choose how you want to put yourself back together. Celebrate your ability to alter or replace or simply adjust your old self into your astonishing new self.

But remember, that new, colorful, amazing groove that we create from the dismal abyss crumpled on that floor is just another illusion. For life means nothing unless we can keep on breaking apart and putting ourselves together again as many times as we need.