I was driving in to work the other day, and was caught behind an enormous tractor-trailer truck trundling along at about 10 mph under the speed limit. Now, you know how I like to drive fast, and it’s always a challenge to curb my impatience and drive slowly. I looked at this behemoth in front of me, and it seemed to take up my entire field of view. The more I looked, the bigger it seemed until my whole world seemed to consist of this large, lumbering truck blocking my forward progress. It was so overwhelming that I stopped this train of thought, took a deep breath, and put my attention to the surrounding landscape. Miracle! Suddenly the truck shrank down to a mere rectangle in front of me. I saw the trees bordering the side of the road, the sky, even cars passing by. My world expanded at a great rate, and the truck became a very small piece of it. OK, this piqued my interest, so I concentrated on the back of the truck again. It grew until it once again became an overwhelming obstacle. I then looked at the surrounding landscape, and voila! The truck shrank back down to insignificant, and even better, took the next exit and disappeared altogether.
So, freed of the impediment, I couldn’t help but to reflect on this very obvious metaphor for how we face our obstacles. When we first encounter them, they expand exponentially until they take up all of our awareness. The bigger they are, the more they impede our forward momentum. However, if we put our attention on the rest of our life (which is usually going along just fine), the obstacle shrinks down to a manageable size, allowing us to better deal with it. Or, it might even go away.
So, why do we let our obstacles get so huge? Maybe we like the drama. Or maybe we’re not aware enough of how much goes right in our lives, so when something goes wrong, it seems much more dire than it really is. But even if it is indeed a drastic situation, I believe that we could more readily deal with it if we could remember what is right with our world: count our blessings, as it were. I have a couple of friends who were faced with great loss in their lives. Each one of them started a gratitude journal; every night they wrote what they were grateful for that day. The first few entries were sparse; they really had to stretch to find something to be grateful for. However, as the days wore on, and their attention was on what was good in their lives, they came to realize the great gifts they had. This helped them to move past their loss.
My guideline from this? When an obstacle starts to become overwhelming, I remember what is right and good and important in my life, and put the obstacle into its proper perspective.