Go with the flow
Perhaps it was a potential life partner who was after your heart or a business deal or job offer that you thought could have made your career, or a medical treatment that you had pinned your hopes on to give a dear one a new lease of life. Only things didn’t go according to the plan.
The alliance failed to materialise or the deal fell through or the response to the medical treatment was way below expectations. Your world collapses around you. You retreat into a shell, mope, cry and sink into a depression of sorts and never ever want to give life another look. Is that the way forward? Certainly not! Moving on is the only solution under the circumstances. Stephen Johnson, author of Who Moved My Cheese, put it simply: “Life moves on and so should we.”
To me the flow of life is like water. The course never runs smooth. If suddenly you find the path is blocked or tortuous, you simply have to work your way around it. What do cardiac surgeons do when the main arteries to the heart are blocked? They try unclogging. But if that doesn’t work, they create a bypass. And the patient very often gets a second chance. This is pretty much what is done on our highways too. Ditto it should be for mental roadblocks too!
Knowing when to take that call and change course is critical. If something isn’t working, you cannot keep trying forever beyond a point. There are some battles not worth clinging on to and it is best to walk away and chart a whole new course. Eventually the very stumbling block will turn out to be the catalyst for something far better. Sometimes by not moving on, you will find that others have moved ahead and you have remained rooted to the same spot.
Moving on is difficult because of various reasons. When something one dearly wanted failed to actualise, it is hard to accept the reality and also to let go of the attachment to what meant so much to us. Even before we had what we wanted, we often build dreams around it. Moving on is also tough because of our ego, as it means acknowledging failure. But by accepting what happened, by giving up attachments and not looking at one’s efforts as a failed attempt but as a necessary part of the learning curve, one can take care of both scenarios. Would you have learnt half as much if everything came easy? Was it not for the stumbling blocks, the denials, the losses, would you have evolved and grown? Isn’t that the very purpose of life?
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