Beth's Ponderings
Once I heard a
story of a gal who was in her car - which was the ONLY vehicle in the parking
lot - and just before she got out, someone else arrived and parked right beside
her, so close she could not open her driver’s side door to get out. After spending many fruitless minutes stewing
and fuming at the other driver, who in that time had, seemingly blissfully
unaware of what they had done to her, gotten out of their car and entered the
building, the gal decided that the ONLY way she would be able to get out would
be to risk ripping her outfit as she climbed into the passenger seat so she
could exit out of the passenger side door.
Just before she actually started to climb over, she realized that she
did have another option...she could just pull out and park in any one of the
many other empty parking spots in the lot.
Now, that story
doesn’t top the one from a Girl Guide Camp I visited years ago, when one of the
Guiders locked her keys in her vehicle and then spent the entire afternoon,
along with the other leaders, trying to figure out how to break into her
vehicle - I can’t remember what vital something was also locked in the vehicle
that made the situation so urgent. After
hours of worry, concern, and almost despair, someone else walked up asked why
she didn’t just reach into the OPEN window and unlock the door!
How many of us are
so used to automatically dealing with the problems in our lives with a single
solution, believing that we have to address the problems in the exact same way
we’ve always dealt with them, and not even really looking to see what the real
problem is, or what other (usually more obvious!) solutions may be available?
Even if you are
facing what looks to be a repeat situation, it isn’t exactly the same as
before, because you aren’t the same person you were when you faced it before,
and because of the different experiences and interactions you’ve had between
the previous situation and the current one, you are actually better equipped to
see the multitude of options available to you, because rarely is there only one
possible solution.
Beth
Read the complete issue of The Chautauqua here: https://sites.google.com/site/thechautauqua25/home/August%2017%2C%202018%20Chaurauqua.pdf?attredirects=0&d=1
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