How To Deal With Life-Changing Moments
By: Zaid K. Dahhaj
Tags: Decision Making, Life, Self Improvement, Psychology, Life Lessons

It was the summer of 2016.

I was living in England at the time because I was pursuing my passion for soccer professionally.

One morning, I received a phone call from my mother that would forever change the direction of my life.

She went on to explain that my father had his second heart attack and was in a coma.

I was thousands of miles away.

I was pursuing a deeply meaningful dream.

And now, I had just received the most emotionally difficult news that I have ever been given.

I was lost, confused, angry, sad, and went through a number of emotional storms during that short period of time.

To cut the story short, I couldn’t afford to continue on with my dream and rightly so had to go back home to meet the rest of my family.

Thinking back on that time now, I realized some important insights:

My dream of playing soccer professionally died along with my father.

I genuinely had it within me to play soccer professionally as a desire, but much of this was influenced by my father.

Now, I view that time in my life as karma that I needed to experience.

I learned so many valuable lessons from travelling to both England and Ireland for soccer and have gained priceless experiences in the process.

I am in complete acceptance of the experience because it is what I needed for my own personal evolution.

This is how you must start to view your own experiences, from a perspective of karma and lessons that need to be learned.

Your attachment to a period of time within your life is preventing you from beginning your new journey.

If I identified as a depressed person after my father died and dream seemed impossible, then I wouldn’t have cultivated my current journey.

I would have been a miserable fuck who lives for Netflix binges, weekend partying, and drug abuse.

I was forced to be detached from that situation and how it turned out because I understood that I was capable of achieving great things.

I became obsessed with my other interests — learning, health, and reading.

Your inability to accept your current situation is holding you back from all the great rewards that your potential new venture could offer you.

Although my professional dream had died, my love for the sport of soccer and playing is resolute.

Now, I took about a 7-month break from soccer shortly after coming back from England.

I was focused on other things and had to step away from the thing that I deeply loved for some time. Looking back on it, this was necessary.

Once I began to experience that urge to play consistently again, I slowly but surely started listening to that intuitive call within me.

Fast forward to now, I am playing better than ever and have created an even healthier and stronger relationship with soccer.

It’s funny how life works, the moment I created this better relationship with soccer was the moment that I began to cultivate a healthier relationship with my father and his passing.

Childhood dreams are deeply intertwined with our parents and childhood lifestyle.

Life changing moments are a natural part of life and we will always have two options when it comes to how we respond to those events:

We can either choose to be a victim of life.

OR

We can choose to rise up and take responsibility for our lives.

I chose to rise up after the passing of my father and am reaping the rewards from that decision.