All That Seems Random # 9 | Mental Contortionist

or sometimes it's dark because we're looking in the wrong place.

A contortionist, much like a magician, an overnight success or a popstar create an illusion by specializing in the skills that show off their most flexible joints (their strengths), with the help of their acting talent (practice) and mime skills (watching, waiting, taking appropriate action).

Not that it's an illusion really, they've just made it look easy because of all the hard work, consistent practice, patience and action that we never actually see happen.

We (that totally means me when I say we) have mentally contorted the things we want or say we want because it's easier be wowed by the illusion and then to pretend our thing is much to hard for us to get. Or pretend it's just too far out of our reach and therefore just plain unattainable for us.

It's not true. A simple example.

One of my dearest friends had to perform a task last week for her employer. It wasn't necessarily a difficult task as it involved dropping something off and picking it up. Very straight forward conceptually. However the implementation was much less so.  The implementation required figuring out a route to the location. Easy enough with mapquest or google maps but then there were the known facts.

Traffic in Atlanta sucks, especially so if it's raining.
The location was in the opposite direction of every thing she ever does (her words).
She and her husband share a vehicle.
She doesn't particularly like to drive.
The drop off location closed at 7:30 PM.
She can always get the vehicle when needed but it requires coordination and her doing lots of driving.
Did I mention traffic in Atlanta is horrible and she doesn't like driving.

So she was envisioning this task as crap, hard, irritatingly out of the way and ugh with lots of driving.

The imagined dread and mental contortion needed to complete this task brought her to a standstill. Then she felt a little pull that said, just wait.

Ooh, easy, she can do that well. So she did.

Turns out two days later, one of the many backgammon gatherings she and her husband enjoy was within 20 yards of where she had to do the drop off / pick up.

The informal backgammon gatherings don't usually happen there. The last one she remembered happening in this far away, hard to get to suburb of Atlanta happened in January or February. She didn't know it was going to happen until a few hours before it did because of the informal nature of the thing.

So this thing she had to do that looked like a raging, river of bad Atlanta traffic and her driving through it, turned out to be some quick walking across a grassy divide and having fun. She dropped the item off, played some backgammon, picked the item up and played some more backgammon.

She avoided all the issues she believed would make this task impossibly hard.

The reality was much nicer and way more fun although getting to the reality required, listening to her little voice and waiting.

That leads us to the random tidbits of which there were only two on the desk this week:

• "Staying the course is NOT the same as clinging to a HOW."
• "You only have to do a little each day, to get a ton done."

Both quotes are from  ~Totally Unique Thoughts from The Universe~

So what random events have shown up in your life, to help you stop making things harder than they really are, that aren't really random at all?

--

LaShae