“It’s Always Something. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another.”
It’s Always Something. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another.
Do you remember this line from the late, Roseanne Roseannadanna? I love it, and use it often to cope with the annoyances that come up daily. It helps me to add humor to the frustration of it all.
Or, there’s this favorite quote, “It is what it is.”
So, what’s it all about, this Acceptance of things that are here. Well, they are here anyway, so we might as well Allow them to be here.
But, “I don’t want it!!!”, you say. And of course you don’t, who would? You aren’t a glutton for punishment. You don’t want to be suffering. You want things to be different. And, maybe you have tried over and over to make things different, and it’s not working. You are stuck. Yes, Stuck, icky, sticky, Yuck, Stuck… Stuck in our lives, stuck in our patterns, stuck in a pile of mud.. .
I was stuck in a pile of mud, a while back, during last hunting season, on a long, deserted road, somewhere in Alabama. I was on the way to a hunting camp at night, with my 2 young children in the car, and no husband (he was there waiting for us). We were stuck… and … scared.
Have you ever gone out into the country on a long, desolate road, and then stopped the car and turned your lights off…. Whoaah.. . that is dark…. And quiet… and Scary… Well, you don’t have much time to sit and worry, when the 2 children begin to speak their minds, “Mommy, what are we going to do? Mommy we are going to be stuck here forever. Mommy, we might die here. Mommy, AAAAAaaaaaAAAHH! Do Something!” And on it went.
And needless to say, their little voices did not do much to soothe my discomfort, except that this did inspire me to realize that If I didn’t do something different, we were all going to soon be in a car full of screaming, and that sounded even more miserable than what we were already dealing with.
So, I switched over to positive, hopeful talk. I stepped out of the car to assess the situation… and dropped down into a very gooey pile of mud. And, I then got up and kept on going… looking for a solution, a board of some kind, anything to help. Not finding much, I went to the road, in hopes of informing a passerby that we could use a hand. And quite soon, a man with a work truck on his way home from a long day, stopped to assist. He had some straps and he tied them to my car, then we pulled, and pulled….Snap goes the strap….and, oh no, what else do we have? He found another option, a safety harness, and he tied this on, and we pulled, and pulled. Slowly, my wheels started to get unstuck, and then we were pulled out into the road.
Yay!!! Everyone cheered, everyone thanked the kind man profusely. Everyone is happy!! And, if it was only that easy in real life. Sometimes it is that easy, and we just need a boost. We just need some help to get pulled out of the muck. And sometimes we need to be stuck a little longer, to learn a lesson of some kind. And, until we learn our lesson, we may remain stuck. And, we can do lots of screaming while we are there, but that doesn’t do much to solve the problem? Or does that just make it more miserable for ourselves and for others while we are there?
What if we try another approach, when we have tried many options, maybe all of the options, and nothing is giving way? What if we chose the “Acceptance stance”?
It looks like this… If you find yourself in quicksand, what is the best way out? Well, it turns out, that, struggling with it, only makes it worse. You sink deeper. But, if you move slowly, and stretch out your arms and lay back, relaxing, then you can float. You don’t like it, you don’t want to be there, but if you just rest into it, relax, and allow, then it will become easier.
Struggle, cussing and fussing, only increases our suffering. So, let’s all slow down, take a long deep breath, allow ‘It’ to be as ‘it’ is.., and …. hope that someone comes along to pull us out of the mud.
Doing my best to .. Live Life On Purpose…. Terri Mudge
