I like a bit of drama. If you ask me how things are going, I’ll tell you the exciting bits and the roadblocks because those things make a good story. Imagine then, my surprise last week as I was processing a fairly major decision and felt completely peaceful about it. Not peaceful because everything was going seamlessly; peaceful because I’ve had a few practise runs in smaller situations and I’ve learned to be content. The decision lingered right to the wire, yet peace overrode it all.
How did that happen?
Over recent years, I have learned to let go, remembered previous outcomes in the midst of drama, and trusted that there is significance in the little things.
Our most stressful moments involve wrestling. It’s the lag between when our expectations are not met and when we accept that fact. Once decisions are made, we can readjust our reality.
It’s when we expected to walk out the door and the disaster happened, when we thought we were doing that thing and the plan changed, when we assumed things would work a certain way because that’s how our family did it and someone is doing it differently. Those are the moments where stress, pressure, anger, and frustration rise to the surface. The quicker we accept reality, the quicker we deal with the facts and move forward.
Acceptance contributes hugely to contentment.
When you’re a high achiever or perhaps you’ve been hurt and are simply vigilant, you are on alert for gaps between expectation and reality. However, you’re probably not in a hurry to accept the gaps. It seems counterintuitive to accept the gaps. You’d prefer to close them. Get rid of them entirely.
Imagine a drop of water in a stream. That drop flows down the streambed and bumps into a rock. The water accepts the rock is there and finds a way around it. If it can’t find a way around the rock, it sits calmly in the space beside it.
Some of the beauty of a flowing stream is in the challenge presented by the rocks. When there are no rocks, we see the water, but we can’t hear it. We watch it flow together, but we don’t see the separating of the drops as they fall down the rock face, launching from one level to another.
Water in the pool doesn’t get mad because it can’t continue on its journey. It remains calm. The rock is there – fact. It can’t go down right now – fact. So, it waits. When the situation changes, it moves.
When we accept the gap, we are left with decisions in how to deal with it. If we’re late leaving the house, we can accept that we’re going to be late and make a plan, or we can wrestle with it all the way and become dangerous on the road, short with our travel companions, upset and in no fit state to function when we finally arrive.
We can only do what we can do. Provided we prepare well, the rest is out of our hands. That is reality. We can wrestle with that or accept it.
Experience makes a difference. Sure, we have bad experiences, those memories might sound the alarm bells early; but I’m thinking more about practising stepping out of our comfort zones to grow capacity. When we’ve stretched in an area, we have more flexibility when the next situation comes around.
A friend of mine runs a hostel. Last week, a guest left their key in the room side of the door and left the room; the door automatically locked. There was no one in the room to take the key out and with the key in the door, they couldn’t unlock it from the outside. Apparently, there was a similar situation several months ago, so my friend knew to call the locksmith straight away. They went through all the wrestling last time. This time they had experience. The mistake had happened. My friend accepted it and dealt with it. Issue resolved.
When people rile you up and you feel yourself wrestling, what story do you play in your head? Do you look for the bad experience that stresses you out even more? Do you reach for the experience that gives you tools to deal with the situation?
If you don’t have a learning experience to draw on, good news: you are going through an experience right now. Now is the moment to try something different and see if it works. This might become the moment that you can look back to in the future.
You might not have a success story, but you can try one thing a little differently today and see what happens. It could be choosing not to tell yourself off for landing here again, try accepting it – well, here I am again. It could be taking a different next step. It could be listening to something you would usually run away from.
Change doesn’t have to be a big change. You don’t have to have it all together in one go. Sometimes it takes deconstructing something and practising in one area, allowing the rest to just ‘be’ in the meantime.
I play the piano. Sometimes, to get a piece of music to sound right, I have to slow down and play with one hand. At first, it might be about figuring out the actual notes – they’re not even in time yet. Then I’ll try to play them in time, but really slowly. Then I’ll speed them up gradually. Yay, progress. But then, I’ve got to put the other hand back in. That probably means slowing it down again. Then playing that one little musical phrase over and over and over and over… I’m not exaggerating, it might take over 20 times to get it right; then I need to play the correct version over and over to teach my fingers the new pattern and override the old pattern that had the mistake in it.
When I take the time to deconstruct music in the spot where I always made a mistake, my muscles almost celebrate when I get to that portion because they know the pattern properly and they relax into it more than they do for the rest of the piece.
When you take the time to deal with that thing, you may eventually find an ease in that area that you never imagined was possible. Of course, the truly complicated sections can take a lot of practise to get to that point, but it is possible.
Even when you don’t get to that point, and that area is still challenging, you have at least established a different pattern by slowing it down and focusing on it. Next time you come across it, there is a better chance that you can navigate it adequately. It might not be perfect, but it’s a great deal better than it was.
Whether it is accepting the gap, learning to be content, drawing on your own learnings, or appreciating small changes, practising is what ingrains something new into your behaviour.
You can tell the story of the slowing down process and the changes that ensued, or you might simply enjoy the improvement in the way the music sounds. Drama or peace, it’s up to you how you process your story.
If it’s a small change, it is still change. If you notice one positive difference, celebrate it. If you feel like you’re going backwards, check out if that’s because you’ve mastered a portion and now you’re adding complexity. None of us is perfect, but we can all make progress.
