I am not at the affect of my circumstances
The hail came.
Or maybe it wasn’t hail for you. Maybe it was flooding, or disease pressure, or equipment failure at the worst possible moment, or a market that collapsed, or an animal you'd invested everything in that didn't make it.
Maybe it was something smaller. A conversation that went sideways, a decision that didn't land the way you planned, a week that unraveled faster than you could hold it together.
Whatever it was…
It happened.
And it was outside your control. And now you're standing in the middle of it trying to figure out what comes next.
This post is about that moment.
The one right after the thing happens and right before you decide what to do about it.
The breath. The pause. The gap that most people don't even know exists. The space where everything that comes next gets decided.
The gap.
Between what happens to you and how you respond to it, there is a space.
It's small.
Sometimes it's just a breath.
Sometimes it's a moment so brief you've already moved through it before you realized it was there.
But it exists.
And inside that space lives something that nothing and no one can take from you:
Your choice.
Not your choice about what happened. That's gone.
The hail fell, the plastic ripped, the animal died, the conversation went wrong. You don't get a vote on any of that.
The circumstances are what they are and arguing with them doesn't change them.
But your choice about who shows up in response. About how you navigate what comes next. About what version of yourself walks out of that gap and into the next hour of your life.
That choice is always available. Even when everything else isn't.
What wallowing costs.
Let's be honest about something first.
The feelings are real.
The grief of a ruined crop, the frustration of a system failure, the fear that runs through you when the numbers don't work - those aren't things to push down or pretend aren't there.
Feeling them is human.
Feeling them is appropriate.
Feeling them is part of being a person who cares about what they've built.
But there's a difference between feeling something and being at the affect of it.
At the affect means the circumstance is in charge.
It decides your mood, your decisions, your capacity, your presence with your family at the end of the day.
It sits in the driver's seat and you ride along, reactive, depleted, unable to access the part of yourself that knows what to do next because the circumstance has taken up all the available space.
Wallowing isn't feeling. Wallowing is giving the circumstance the keys.
And on a farm, where the next thing is always coming and where a bad season doesn't pause while you recover from it, where the animals still need feeding and the markets still need attending and the decisions still need making, staying at the affect of what went wrong is one of the most expensive things you can do.
Not because the feelings don't deserve space.
But because you need yourself right now. And wallowing puts you out of reach.
Radical acceptance.
Here's the hardest and most liberating thing I know about hard moments on a farm.
What's done is done.
The crop is gone. The plastic is ripped. The livestock is now deadstock. The conversation happened the way it happened.
No amount of replaying it, resenting it, arguing with it, or wishing it were different will change any of it by a single degree.
Radical acceptance isn't giving up.
It isn't deciding it doesn't matter or that you're fine with what happened or that you're not allowed to be devastated by it.
It's simply acknowledging (fully, clearly, without flinching), that this is the reality you're working with now.
This happened. This is where I am. Now what?
That "now what" is where your agency lives.
Not in the event, in the response.
Not in what you couldn't control, in what you can.
Relinquishing the illusion that you could have prevented it, or could somehow undo it, or that your distress about it changes it.
That relinquishing is not weakness.
It's the most pragmatic, most powerful thing you can do in the aftermath of something hard.
It clears the space. It gives you yourself back. It makes the next right thing possible.
The difference between knowing and choosing.
This is the part that changes everything.
You already know what you should do.
You know you should stay calm.
You know you should think clearly.
You know you should be present for your family tonight instead of carrying the bad day in the door with you.
You know you should make the decision from the rational part of your brain instead of the scared part.
But knowing doesn't make it happen.
Knowing is outside you. It's information.
It's the advice someone gives you, or the thing you tell yourself you should do, or the logical conclusion you reach when you think about it clearly.
And it slides right off when the pressure gets high enough because it was never really inside you to begin with.
Choosing is different.
Choosing is an act of will that comes from inside.
It's not “I should be calm right now” (which is just advice your stressed brain will ignore).
It's "I choose to be calm right now" (which is a commitment you make to yourself, from yourself, that has actual weight because you put it there).
I choose to navigate this with grace.
I choose to be the person who handles hard things well.
I choose to show up for my family tonight even though the day was brutal.
I choose to make this decision from clarity rather than fear.
Those aren't affirmations.
They're not positive thinking.
They're decisions.
Internal commitments that land in a completely different place than external prescription ever does. Because they're yours. You made them.
And because you made them they have a chance of actually changing what comes next.
I am not at the affect of my circumstances.
This is the sentence worth memorizing.
Not because it makes the hard things easier exactly.
Not because it takes away the grief or the fear or the exhaustion that comes with a farming life that asks everything of you and sometimes takes it anyway.
But because it reminds you, in the moment when you most need the reminder, that the circumstances are not the final word on who you are or how you show up or what you're capable of.
The hail doesn't decide that.
The failed season doesn't decide that.
The conversation that went wrong, the animal that didn't make it, the plan that didn't hold - none of those things get to decide who walks through the next hour of your life.
You decide that.
In the gap. In the breath. In that small fierce space between what happened and what comes next.
I am not at the affect of my circumstances. I am the one who chooses what happens after.
How to access it when you need it.
In truth, the question "who do I want to be in this moment?" is much harder to access in a crisis if you've never practiced it in the quiet moments.
The muscle gets built when things are fine. It gets used when things aren't.
If you've been asking the question proactively before the hard days, at the start of difficult seasons, in the ordinary moments of your farming life.
Then when the hail comes, the question is already familiar.
Already part of how you move through things.
Already available in the gap before you've even had time to think about it.
That's not an accident. That's the practice paying off.
And if you haven't been practicing it (or if this is the first time you've thought about the gap between what happens and how you respond), that's okay too.
You can start now.
In this moment.
With whatever hard thing is sitting in front of you right now.
Take the breath. Find the gap. Ask the question.
Who do I want to be here?
Not who have I been. Not who does everyone expect me to be. Not who does stress or fear or exhaustion send by default.
Who do I choose to be.
That choice is available to you right now. It has always been available to you. Even here. Even in this.
If this resonated, you might also want to read:
Who do I want to be in this moment? — The proactive version of this practice — how to set the intention before the hard moment arrives
Why you're still exhausted even after the stressor is gone — What your nervous system needs after something hard and how to actually give it that
The Becoming — The bigger picture of who you're growing into through every hard season
You are more capable than your hardest moment suggests.
I've watched farmers navigate things that should have broken them and come out the other side not just intact but genuinely changed in ways that made them better farmers, better partners, better people.
Not because the hard thing didn't hurt. But because they found the gap. They made the choice. They showed up as the person they decided to be instead of the person the circumstance was trying to make them.
That's available to you too.
If you want to explore what it looks like to do this work with support - to build the practice before the hard moments arrive and have someone in your corner when they do - I'd love to talk.