In my quest to become a counselor, something I had noticed is I’m not easily rattled. I’ve been saying this about myself for a while-that nothing shocks me. I may be desensitized but I see it as a strength. It’s not resilience. It’s understanding. An understanding of all the possibilities in the reality we live in. Any trajectory can happen, and we find many of them do.
The variation lies in our reaction. It can be helpful or unhelpful and I don’t want the bandwidth to increase by adding a big reaction to the mix. At what rate do we want to move forward? My personal choice is sooner rather than later. Otherwise, we stay stuck in the negative for far too long and miss out on the opportunity to move forward sooner. If it is a fact that our lives ebb and flow between negative events and positive, why spend any more time in the negative than I have to? Sometimes a negative event occurs in your own life that is not your choice so when I do have control, I’m going to choose to move forward as efficiently as possible rather than overreacting.
I feel like people might see my non-reaction as a flaw. I know there are some that get highly irritated with my lack of quick reaction but I compare each problem in front of me with the worst problems on this earth. At the same time, I’m also thinking about how this problem will look in the future if we are calm about it. When I think of a problem in this way, I see most dissipating on their own without emergency intervention or reaction. Again, I see it as a strength. What’s the use in getting all up in arms about yet another discrepancy in our world. Most are just normal situations these days. I don’t like to add fuel to the fire. I like to just ask what is the next step then? Since no one I know can perform magic, let’s fix or alleviate this in the fastest, calmest way we can. And more than that, if something is not dire, do we really need to address it or let it settle without harm?
Because I’m always deep in the thought processes of counseling, I often ask myself the question I tell everyone to ask themselves: Is this a small problem or a big problem? Big problems include someone being hurt, basically leaving most problems to be small or possibly medium. Even financial issues, I consider medium in the wake of people being hurt or dying. I simply cannot separate my mind from the knowledge that there are so many worse situations than those most people consume themselves with.
Changes are a big one. People have a very hard time with any change, which IS understandable. However, when seen through the lense of the size of the problem, it usually does land in the category of small problems.
I also have noticed that a herd mentality can be unhelpful. If everyone is reacting to a problem, what does that do to the problem? It ALWAYS makes it bigger. The less reaction, the less strength we give to the problem itself. If you solve the problem collaboratively while focused on solutions instead of going on about the circumstances of the problem, that problem will, most certainly, take up less time in your life.
I don’t know about you, but I consider my life precious, and I hope that everyone else feels the same about their own. I can tell you, I want to spend my time collaborating and problem solving, not going in circles over and over about the useless details that encompass the problem.
I’ve said it 100 times before: a life IS the obstacles. Every single person’s life is made up of obstacle after obstacle after obstacle. We are ALL in a huge obstacle course. How do YOU want to go through each one? By complaining, discussing asinine details and staying in one place mentally for a long time OR do you want to spend time deciding what’s most helpful in this scenario and taking the steps to get there?
onthecontrarykelly 