If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. Open a gap, create a space. Be patient.
Hilary Mantel
Everywhere, take your time, so you do not give the mind an opportunity to speed up and get out of control. Negative thoughts are fast. Positive thoughts are slow.
Eknath Easwaran
Have you ever considered that what you thought was missing was not actually missing? That your mind clouded over in anxiety and played tricks on you?
It is faith and peaceful reflection that allow things to be discovered. But the mind likes speed; its’ whirling and spinning out of control. My mind has done this often. I am sitting at my desk. Suddenly I am called out of my office. Or I go take a walk. And when I return, my eyeglasses are not on my desk.
First I feel this mild panic and queasy stomach. “I have no time for this”, my mind shouts. “I’m down to the wire.” My eyes look this way and that. My mind is racing. “I can’t finish this project without them.” My shoulders are rock-like. My limbic brain is on alert. “Code Blue. Code Blue.”
That is exactly what happened to a friend this week when I called her. With very little words from her, “Code Blue” screamed across the telephone wires. I could almost see the veins popping in her neck. “I lost it! I lost it! My report I spent all week on. It’s gone. I don’t know where! I am afraid I left it in that last huge conference room and someone threw it out!” Code Blue. Code Blue.
I guided her in a leadership exercise to reconnect with her document. Her shrill thoughts escalated in and out at a fevered pitch. They forecast doom and condemnation. Her mind ruled out simple solutions. At every turn it thwarted her process.
But she kept at it and her Code Blue simmered down. Finally, her sputtering mind stopped for a moment. Her intuition said quietly. “It’s not lost. It’s not where you’d expect it.” That intuition saved her a wild trip across four counties to go search in, what likely would be, a closed conference facility. Her intuition said: “Enough, rest, eat. Let go.”
About an hour later, she emailed me, reporting she had found it. She learned something about the tricky mind: it abruptly guaranteed that she would never leave her reports in the place her intuition suggested that she look.
What is lost is not lost. This was certainly so with Buddy, the dog, who was missing for seven years. Mrs. Hartman demonstrates in this positive story what faith in the yet-to-be found can do. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/10/dog-reunited-with-owners-7-years-missing_n_5127079.html?utm_hp_ref=good-news
How about you, reader? What’s your intuition guiding you to discover that you once thought was lost?
2 comments:
Um, I can relate. I once panicked when I thought I'd lost my glasses and they were actually on my face! Such chagrin!, Gulp!
Thanks for the acknowledgement, Snow Flower. I am sure we all have had those moments with glasses and such like you and me.
It seems we are all longing to slow things down in our multi-complex world. When we are called away to a new task, we all likely need a transition moment. No need for chagrin.....
Post a Comment