How to Ride the Waves of Life’s Wildest Detours with a Grin and a Grip
Change is a funny thing. Sometimes you walk toward it with your chin up, your bags packed, and your heart singing. You decide to quit the job, move to the mountains, start the business, or say yes to the adventure that scares you half to death. You choose it. You own it. You wear it like a brand new coat.
And then there are the other times. The times when change shows up at your door unannounced, wearing muddy boots, carrying a sledgehammer, and rearranging your furniture before you’ve even had your morning coffee. You didn’t invite it. You didn’t plan for it. But there it is, large as life, tapping its foot impatiently and saying, Well? Are you coming or not?
Either way, here’s the beautiful, wild, sometimes terrifying truth: change is the ride, and you’re already on it. So you might as well lean in, throw your hands up, and enjoy the view.
The Two Flavors of Change: Chosen and Delivered to Your Doorstep
Let’s start by talking about the two main ways change enters our lives, because understanding them makes the whole experience a lot less bewildering.
First, there’s chosen change — the kind you actively pursue. Maybe you decided to pick up and move somewhere completely new, like a fifteen-year-old girl stepping off a plane into the Alaskan wilderness with a suitcase full of inadequate clothing and a heart full of stubborn optimism. That’s chosen change. It’s bold, it’s intentional, and it still manages to surprise you six ways to Sunday once you’re actually living it.
Then there’s unchosen change — the variety that gets thrust upon you like an unexpected assignment from a teacher you didn’t realize you had. A job disappears. A relationship shifts. A health scare rewrites your morning routine. A wringer washer tries to drag you into another dimension. Whatever form it takes, this kind of change doesn’t wait for your permission. It simply arrives, sets up camp in your living room, and starts brewing its own coffee.
The good news? Both flavors of change, chosen and delivered, carry within them the same extraordinary potential to transform you into something more alive, more resilient, and more marvelously yourself.
Seasonal Vibes and the Channels of Change That Shape Us All
Here’s something worth sitting with for a moment: change is deeply seasonal. Just as the natural world moves through cycles of growth, dormancy, storm, and bloom, so do we.
The Seasonal Vibes channels of change run through every single chapter of our lives, whether we notice them or not. Spring brings new beginnings. Summer pushes us to expand. Autumn asks us to let go. And winter — ah, winter — winter teaches us how to survive the dark so we can appreciate the light.
When you start paying attention to these Seasonal Vibes channels of change, something remarkable happens. You begin to see that you’re not just reacting to life — you’re participating in it. You recognize that the hard season you’re currently living through is doing something important. It’s not punishing you. It’s preparing you. Much like an Alaskan winter that arrives with frostbitten ferocity doesn’t aim to destroy the land — it simply resets it, hardens it, and makes it ready for the extraordinary softness of spring. When you align yourself with these natural rhythms rather than fighting them tooth and nail, change starts to feel less like a catastrophe and more like a compass pointing you toward the next version of yourself.
When the Ground Shifts: How to Stand Tall in the Middle of Everything Moving
So, what do you actually do when the rug gets pulled out from under you? When the change wasn’t on your calendar, wasn’t in your budget, and definitely wasn’t part of the five-year plan you laminated and stuck to the refrigerator?
First of all, you breathe. Deeply and without apology. Because the instinct when life destabilizes is to grip tighter, move faster, and panic louder — and none of those things actually help.
Instead, try doing what the Alaskan wilderness would tell you if it could speak plainly: Pay attention. Danger, disruption, and difficulty don’t usually roar. They whisper. They nudge. They leave clues in the quiet moments when you’re still enough to notice them.
Remind yourself that standing tall during upheaval doesn’t mean pretending everything is fine. It means rooting yourself in what you know to be true — your values, your people, your ability to figure things out — and letting that foundation hold you while the storm passes. Because it always passes. Every single time. And what it leaves behind is almost always more interesting than what it swept away.
The Laugh-Out-Loud Truth About Embracing What You Didn’t Ask For
Here’s a secret that only the truly seasoned riders of life’s wild rollercoaster know: the changes you didn’t choose often turn out to be the ones that change you the most profoundly. And if you can find even a sliver of humor in the chaos — laugh at the frozen laundry flapping stiff as cardboard in the subarctic wind, chuckle at the moose who wanders past your kitchen window like he owns the place — you will get through it with your spirit gloriously intact.
Embracing unchosen change doesn’t mean you have to love it immediately or pretend it doesn’t hurt. It simply means you decide, somewhere in the middle of the mess, to stay curious rather than closed. To ask, “What is this teaching me?” rather than ‘Why is this happening to me?” When you shift that question, everything shifts with it. The obstacle becomes the curriculum. The detour becomes the destination. The thing you never would have chosen becomes the story you tell with the most warmth, the most pride, and the most genuine, full-throated laughter.
Just Around the Corner: Why the Next Change Is Already Waiting for You
Here’s the part that some people find unsettling and others find wildly liberating: the change you’re currently navigating is not the last one. Not even close.
Just around the corner, life is already cooking up the next plot twist, polishing the next curveball, and getting the next chapter ready for publication. The Northern Lights don’t appear just once and call it a season. They return, night after night, in new formations, new colors, new dances across the sky — because that’s simply what they do.
One of the most powerful mindset shifts you can make is to stop treating each change as though it’s a crisis to survive and start treating it as a scene in a story you’re actively writing.
Know another change is coming — when you hold that knowledge not as a threat but as a promise — you stop white-knuckling the present moment and start actually living it. You become, over time, someone who is genuinely good at change. Someone who packs lighter, adapts faster, and finds the magic more readily in each new unfamiliar landscape. And trust me, that person is an absolute joy to be around — including to yourself.
Carry Your Stories Like Firewood: The Beautiful Weight of Who Change Has Made You
At the end of it all — after the wringer washers and the frozen winters, after the chosen leaps and the uninvited disruptions, after the seasons of survival and the seasons of soaring — what you carry forward is a collection of stories. Heavy, yes. Occasionally awkward to transport. But warming in the right hands, and absolutely necessary for lighting the fires that keep other people going on their coldest nights.
- Embrace the changes. Both the ones you march into with your eyes open and the ones that ambush you in the kitchen at seven in the morning.
- Embrace them because they are the very mechanism by which you become more fully, more authentically, more genuinely you.
- Embrace them because the version of you that exists on the other side of each disruption is someone worth becoming.
- Embrace them because life — with all its cosmic humor, its icy eyebrows, its moose wandering past your window — is doing exactly what it promised: shaping you.
Not breaking you. Shaping you. Into someone who can stand her ground, laugh at the absurdity, and look the next change square in the eye with a grin that says, Bring it. I’ve been waiting for you. And then, with all the style and warmth and hard-won confidence you’ve accumulated along the way, wink right back at it.
Now go out there, enjoy the ride, and don’t forget to wink.
And if you need a little nudge from others who have been there, check out Alexie Linn’s featured reads this month:
- Joan Freed’s The Aurora Borealis Affair — a rebel life‑coach romp that proves chosen change can be equal parts hilarious, inconvenient, and liberating.
- Sally the Loner’s The Mysterious Mistresses of Mormon Lake Lodge — a cozy‑chaotic mystery where unexpected change arrives with secrets, sass, and a lodge full of women who refuse to play by the rules.
- Alexie’s memoir Alaska: My First Frontier — a raw, funny, unfiltered coming‑of‑age story that shows exactly what unchosen change looks like when it drops you into the Alaskan wilderness with inadequate clothing and a stubborn streak.
Each book is its own masterclass in navigating detours — chosen, uninvited, or downright absurd.
And hang on…
Subscribe to never miss a post. Subscribe to my newsletter for fun freebies.
Join and Follow Alexie Linn on:
TeePublic Shop where you’ll find hyacinths for the soul
