This is the BBC World Service. I'm Sanasafi and welcome to World of Wisdom, where we explore

some of the personal issues that life presents.

Sometimes, we find we set out on a path with an idea of our future that can simply no longer

hold. The life we believe we should be living, the expectation of the person we would become,

does not match up with reality anymore. We find the need to change our expectations of our

own future. And that can be a very hard thing to do. Max wrote to us from Germany about

a difficult situation that so many people experience. We introduced him to Dr. Sheffali, author

of Radical Awakening. Here is Max with his question.

I am in the process of getting divorced during the pandemic. It's been tough coming to terms

with that, especially letting go of my idea of a nuclear family and my idea of what my

life would be like. So I've worked on feeling more at peace with that. However, I do worry

about how the issues of my divorce are influencing my relationship with my two kids. Sometimes

I feel so preoccupied with the legal matters and so on. That means I'm not as much there

for them as I could be. So my question is, how can I work to stay connected to my children

in this situation?

It's so hard, I think, when we don't get to live a life that we expected. And when expectations,

clash with reality, it's such a devastation. Every time we create a fantasy for how our

life should be, what we're really doing is acting as if we are psychic because we are

predicting something for a long future that we have no business even attempting. We are

predicting that things will look like this for the next 25 years. Or this is who I will

be in 25 years from now. And that's what marriage is on some very fundamental level. It's

a prediction.

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