Tag: Progress

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To_Rise_Above

Photo:12019/Pixabay

Each and every day, life presents us with challenges; those that try our patience, those that cause anger, those that scare us. And depending on what we face, we handle them in various ways and keep moving through our lives. Much of what ‘challenges’ us does so because there is often fear behind our reaction. Things such as ‘Am I going to get through this?’ ‘What will people think of me when they find out?’ Or ‘Will this cause me to lose my job?’ All things that make us pause, think a bit more deeply than simpler questions demand of us, and make a decision.  As humans, there is a strong desire to stay safe and keep ourselves alive, and things that scare us are connected to those fears that things may change and not for the better. 

George Bernard Shaw said that progress—hope—depends on the courage of the unreasonable man. The man that walks into the arena to face the lion, the one that swims out into the ocean to save the one who was not paying attention to the currents, the one who simply looks fear in the eye and does not flinch. Yet, all of us, at some time, have made the decision that ‘it is too much,’ for us to handle. Yet Shaw’s ‘unreasonable man’ is the reason things change for the better. All those expressions like ‘The tall flower gets cut down.’ or, ‘no one has ever done that’ can be taken in many different ways, though. Certainly, the way many of us understand them is that we are not to take the risk, challenge the authority, or upset the cart. Because people will not like it, and they will then blame us. If we truly believe these sayings, and many of us do, good would never triumph over evil, the status quo would never be challenged, and nothing would ever improve. Can you imagine? Living in a world where nothing changes? Where the powerful always win? Where the powerless always lose?

This is where the expression ‘ordinary people doing extraordinary things’ reminds us that while we can choose courage ourselves, sometimes we believe in something so much that courage chooses us and we find ourselves doing things we never would believe we could do, yet there we are, doing them. It’s one thing to be scared of something or someone, yet it’s another thing entirely to live in fear of them. What most people generally want in life is actually on the other side of fear. Which means we need to rise above our fears, our doubts, our lack of training or education, and simply do it. Instead of making a choice to be afraid and avoiding the challenge in front of us, a better tack is to decide on what action we will take. It can be small or it can be large, but actually doing something to address what is perplexing us helps build our own confidence, which leads to the realization that there are other things that we might be able to do as well.

These are extraordinary decisions, big and small, and they are our baby-stepping stones to learning what we are capable of doing and of living the life we always thought we would live. To rise above our fears and say…’Yes, I will try.’

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Accepting Struggle

Struggle is just another word for growth. This is a phrase I try to remember when I am struggling with something, be it at work, at home, within society, or elsewhere. Any time this occurs, it’s easy to remember the ‘better times’ when things were not in turmoil, when our minds were more at ease, and it was easier to make decisions. But, like an acorn that grew into an oak tree, the struggle itself is the thing that actually makes the majesty of a mature oak possible. It’s the germination of the seed within the acorn itself that begins the entire process of ‘creating’ an oak tree, as it gets larger, pushing through the earth, tiny leaves pushing through the bark as it continues to slowly grow, each step bringing maturity and growth. As for the nascent oak tree, growth is not easy for human beings as well. We probably all remember our struggles in our teen years as we learned more and more of what it was to become an adult; sometimes exciting, sometimes scary, but all part of the journey to adulthood. This is one of our greatest periods of learning in life, as each thing we learn expands our minds, our consciousness, and our spirits. As we get older, these days of learning tend to be lumped into a category of things that happened before we became adults, and is largely forgotten by most of us, and far too often, the learning stops. We seek continuity, be it in our relationships, our careers, and so much else. To ‘get through the day,’ even when we love our work, sometimes becomes our mantra, and we try to avoid or avert anything that looks like struggle.

To remember, then, that struggle can be an indication of real and important progress, and to accept its role in allowing us to grow as humans and become better people, is often difficult. Important questions that need to be asked at this point might include: ‘What is this teaching me? What is it that I need to learn right now? From this situation? What is this preparing me to be able to do in the future? Because struggle often triggers fear, these questions are difficult to remember sometimes, because we are now in survival mode, and the more philosophical questions get lost as we defend or protect ourselves. Greeting the struggle, especially the questions we humans ask one another, is so very difficult sometimes. Already in defense mode, the questions as to what we are doing, thinking, and trying to create, are greeted with defensive answers, often not fully developed, as we make our way to the next higher level of being in our lives. At this point, we can easily be ‘defeated’ and can retreat on our journey in order to create status quo, or we can simply put our nose to the grindstone and keep moving toward our own, perhaps-undefined goal, despite not quite being sure what that goal is at times. Here, our stillness and our quietness are our closest allies. Stillness, defined in terms of not giving up, of continuing toward the direction we have already seen in our minds, and of not responding, or reacting, to the questions we hear, is vital. Simply being quiet, saying nothing, accepting the questions and criticism of others as simply noise on our journey allows us to focus on what is ahead, what dragons we need to slay, what step is next, and permits our entire being to concentrate on moving forward. To react, to respond, is exactly what will freeze our movement. Not reacting to criticism is so very difficult, though, and requires dedication and practice. ‘No, I don’t agree with what was said, but I can let it go.’ ‘Yes, it seems risky, but I know this is the way through,’ are both thoughts that can help us navigate this passage. It is truly sailing between Scilla and Charybdis though, being tempted at every turn, to respond and join the external conversation; the conversation that truly pulls the wind out of our sails.

Sometimes, to move forward, is a solo journey, and can sometimes feel lonely, because moving through life forces us to face who we are, truthfully, and without the masks we often create to make ‘life’ a little easier. Taking that journey unmasked, especially to ourselves, is to reject the little things that made moving forward easier, and taking on the naked truths we need to reach those higher levels of being, where we can truly be ourselves, and not a shadow of who and what we were truly meant to be.

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One Step Back

When we think of our lives, we tend to remember the wonderful times first: when we succeeded, when we felt loved, when we felt happiness. We tend to put the tougher times, when we failed, or felt lost, into the back of our mind and sometimes have trouble remembering the details of those events. In the long game, though, we fly and we fall at different times, and these are just steps we take on our journey. Because we tend to be hardwired for ‘good’ things, we tend to look at our failures, however large or small they may be, as bad things. The reality of a journey, however, is that a step backward is simply that: ONE step backward. That step back does not erase all of the steps we too forward to reach our current destination.

To keep perspective on this idea, think of learning to read and to write. When we first look at a printed page, it may look like a series of black dots and lines, but as we begin to learn the alphabet, we begin to see a particular order. We may not yet understand that order, or how to interpret it, but we needed to see those black lines and dots in order to reach the next step of seeing the individual letters as well as how they are grouped to form words. From the recognition of individual words, comes the cognizance of seeing them arranged in ideas and thoughts, which is the stage that we begin to actually read what was heretofore a mystery to us. Along that simplified passage, we come across things that confuse us, that we mispronounce as we read aloud, that we don’t understand, and these, too, are just steps forward.

What we forget as adults, as we become more knowledgeable, is that each step has been accomplished as just one part of a larger task, and that as we go forward, if we need to take a step back, that it does not erase all the forward steps we took to reach that point. As adults, we tend to look at learning as something we did in our past, and now that we are grown-up, we should already know this. Which begs the question of why should we know this? Anyone who has been taught to read as a teenager or an adult can identify with the struggle to learn to read; for them, however, this is a passage into living a fully functioning life that is truly new to them. They knew they might have trouble learning this, and knew they had to work hard to learn this new skill. It is the mindset of someone who knows what they know, but more importantly, knows what they don’t know, and that it may not be easy. They don’t see a step back—to learn past or future tense, for example—as something bad, but as yet another step taken to better understanding.

We all continue to learn new things as we progress through life, be it academic, athletic, artistic, and simply letting go of the idea of ‘at my age, I should know this…,’ will open us up to many new things that bring us to new levels of understanding. Even for those things we already know, new insight and awareness come with seeing things from a different perspective.