Do you ever have days, maybe even weeks, when it seems that your head just spins from the clutter within it and the noise, confusion and turmoil that abound around you? And you wonder if you’re the one going insane, or if it’s just “all a them”? And then with no surprise, you sometimes realize it’s just all of us in “today’s crazy world”!
It always helps to have something or someone to blame! A temperary band-aid never hurts.
Sometimes it doesn’t help either. I read something this morning that made me ponder. I always like to ponder because it takes me to a quiet place inside myself where I have to turn everything off to actually listen to something besides myself or the noise out there. What I read was the quote, “The problem is the solution. Everything works both ways. It is only how we see things (look at things) that makes them advantageous or not.” Granted this was a quote about agriculture, permaculture to be exact on weeds and crops, but it made sense to ponder it anyway, and see if it fit for other issues.
I decided it did.
A good portion of our life and our life’s work (vocation, career, family, etc.) is something that we can neither control or are supposed to. What we can (should) control is how we choose to deal with it. This isn’t always easy to do, especially in this day and age when it feels like we have very little control over our own lives. Even less during a pandemic or other larger-than-life circumstances.
But we DO have control, or at least the right to take control over our own lives because that is our responsibility and, so far, our right to do so while still living in a free country. God Bless America!
Like the above quote implies, it’s best to begin with a look at the problem and try to find a solution instead of a bigger problem. To do this, it’s important to find a place alone to think, pray, listen and reason things out. It could be a few minutes a day if that’s all you have. It might mean giving up reading time, tv time, computer time, coffee ajenda time, just to sit a minute alone and be still, long enough to feel some sense of peace washing over you. If this doesn’t happen, it may require more drastic moves like stepping way from responsibilities long enough to find peace and stillness, alone. This might be a warm soaking bath, a brisk 15 minute walk, a power nap when your body is screaming for it
or a ramble in the woods/nature.
If we don’t take care of our mental health when it’s screaming for peace and stillness, we won’t be able to take care of anyone else in our charge or at our work,
because our own physical and emotional health becomes affected, too.
When we finally learn to say “no” to what we don’t need to try to handle in order to say yes to a little peace and stillness, then we begin to shift from being a part of the “crazy insane world” around us to becoming a part of the solution –
by our own example of peace and stillness!
~ Gwen of IRISH ACRES
댓글