Ok, I know I’ve been slacking and haven’t been keeping up with my goal of one post per month. I’ll try to get another one up here this month to even it out.
I’ve written about not judging things that happen before. Maybe it’s good. Maybe it’s bad. How do we know how things are all going to flow together? And how is assigning a value to every little thing helping us on our journey anyway? Not judging each moment is really taking things as they come. These small shifts in perspective can have big results down the line. Is it an obstacle or is it a challenge? What’s the difference? Well, an obstacle just sounds like a pain in the ass, doesn’t it? But a challenge, while it is hard and requires effort to overcome, could still be fun.
I recently did one of those mud race obstacle course things with my daughter. We crawled through mud, carried rocks and climbed over a 6 foot wall. But we did it for fun. We really can have fun working our way through challenges.
After one of these posts, a friend of mine wrote to me about not seeing things as obstacles. I don’t remember exactly how I answered but it was something about how everything might not be good or bad but we can definitely tell if something is an obstacle or going to be hard to deal with. I was so stuck in seeing things as obstacles that I couldn’t see what he was trying to tell me. Getting away from judging everything as good or bad is a start, but I was still making a different kind of value judgement.
I’ve been dealing with a moral challenge. I was given a piece of information that made me feel a lot of things. But, initially, I mostly felt confused. For the first time, in my adult life, I needed to reach out to another friend for help in how to handle a situation. The process has been ongoing. Speaking about it with this friend, again, on a second occasion, I was thinking how tired I was of talking and thinking about the whole thing. But, at the same time, I realized that part of me was enjoying the challenge of handling this moral dilemma.
That sounds a little weird, but what I’m trying to get at is the idea of just trying to enjoy what we’re being dealt. The past few weeks of my life would have been easier if I didn’t have this extra thing to think about and carry around with me. But I do. And the reason that it’s bothering me is because I care about the people involved. Realizing that is important too.
Maybe this whole obstacle/challenge thing is why I’ve always loved street skateboarding. I’m no good at it but I love watching people who are. They’re just skating along using the obstacles in their path as opportunities to do tricks and have fun. They are turning the obstacles into the fun part of the ride. That’s what made that run I did with my daughter fun too. If it wasn’t for the obstacles, it would have just been a boring run.
If none of this made any sense, just go listen to “Take it as it Comes” by the Doors.