Avoiding the Struggle - not

Apparently life is a struggle. Do you happen to have noticed this? Whatever your frame of mind, wherever or whoever you are, or are with, or without; whatever your income or lack of it; whatever has gone before or is to come, good, bad or indifferent, we all struggle at times. Sometimes it's worse than we ever imagined, sometimes it's teeny weeny. It all matters though.

Everyone else seems to manage. There they are, fresh as a daisy first thing in the morning, well fed and dressed kids in tow, hair and makeup gorgeous and smiling, of all things! What is their secret? And how come we can't all share in it...

I guess we are all guilty of thinking that Ms X is not having to struggle through quite the same workload, and it's easy for her to look that gorgeous, she was born that way. But do we really know what is going on behind the scenes? Of course not. She might have all sorts of struggles of her own that we know nothing about - she almost certainly has!

So why does she look as if she's having an easier time of it/is more organised/happier/has it together? Maybe it's Maybelline, of course, LOL, but maybe it's her attitude to the whole life is a struggle thing. For all we know her rent is due, her cancer is back and the bank is going to foreclose on her little business, and she is terribly worried and just trying to keep it all together by looking as if she actually IS.

The way we look at things changes not just how they seem, but how they actually are. If we perceive something as a problem, it is. If we see it as a thing we can break down into smaller chunks and solve, that's just what it is. Whatever we believe becomes our truth.

Avoiding struggle, inconvenience, misfortune, challenges and problems doesn't make them go away and it doesn't even stop the pain. It might keep us stuck in limbo for a while, wondering why things aren't going our way, but that's about all - apart from the fact that if you are stuck, and not moving forward, you will find you have a backlog of things to deal with once you start up again...

The thing to do is not to avoid, but to face things head on, to work through them one chunk at a time, to see them, to feel, touch, smell and taste them, to listen to them with all our heart, to wallow in them even: to learn all we can about the problem and ourselves. Once we have done that, it's not even there anymore, we are out the other side and hey, guess what, we survived another day!

It will take a little discipline, but not the "grab em by the scruff of the neck and whip em" kind! No, we are going to use much gentler discipline - well, I am anyway, I don't know what you are going to choose to do!

I am already using some long forgotten self discipline, in committing to going for my walks, making an appointment with myself 3 mornings a week and doing what needs to be done to get myself out of bed to do it. Of course it's easier to just lie there, and roll back over! But it won't get me to where I want to be, so I am disciplining myself to seize the moment and just DO it! Same with the whole food issue, etc. Just do it already. In the end, it's actually easier than listening to my head give me a good talking to for avoiding it all, LOL!