Just when you think your life is smoothing out and you start settling in for a calm stretch, an obstacle appears in your path. Sometimes it crashes in front of you with a bang! Sometimes it seems to grow overnight and you wake up and there it is. Other times it creeps up slowly and you watch it grow, but keep denying it’s there.
In all cases – oops – there it is. It takes on many forms, too. It can be like a huge snowman – do you smash it to smithereens or do you just do nothing until it melts away. It can also appear like a maze, where you wander through it day after day, turning first this way, then that, always searching for the way out. Then there’s the huge stairway where the stairs are as high as your hip and you have to actually push yourself up with your hands and hoist yourself up on each one. You get so tired. You get on top, stand up and look up and the number of stairs seems to go to the sky, overwhelming you to the point of asking yourself if it’s worth it.
It’s always worth it. Throughout the years I’ve learned a few things about these obstacles. Being worth it is one. That fact that there’s always an end, a solution, a resolution, is another. The snowman eventually melts away and green grass remains. You accidentally fall out the back door of the maze and everything is clear again. The stairs are the hardest. You persist and learn patience and hard work along the way, but one day you stand up and when you look up, there’s no more stairs. You’re next to the sun. You feel the warmth and the sweet relief that “it’s finally over”.
I have decided to approach this new year and all it’s inevitable obstacles with tolerance. One might ask why tolerance as opposed to strength. I have found the strength to overcome big things comes from the amount of tolerance we practice both with ourselves and with others as we move toward our solutions. It would be unrealistic to hope for a year with no big things to overcome, so it’s best to have a plan in place before 2011 scoops us up and carries us on a new journey this year. Realizing that overcoming big things is what moves us along the conveyor belt of life, makes us more tolerant of the messes we get ourselves into. Being tolerant affords us some serenity, finding peace in the fact that “it’s not the end of the world” and “this too, shall pass”.
Whether it’s the snowman, the maze, or the dreaded stairs that I will be called upon to face in the months to come, I’m going be tolerant of the space and time I need to work through each one, knowing that it’s “necessary”and I will be a better person for it by the time 2012 gets here.
I want to take this time to wish all my readers a very happy new year tonight. Be kind, be gentle, be tolerant of those important in your life, but most of all, extend that tolerance to yourself.
And so, as another day goes by, it takes with it yet another year, and….for the last time this year…I have written.
i love this one! I like reading your posts..ahhhh..just went on a nature hike and had your book in my hand! LOL! do it!!!