While the situation isn’t desirable by any stretch of the imagination, if you find yourself stranded on the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere, dependent on a car that abruptly stopped and won’t restart, there are typically steps you can take that will get you out of your predicament. Likewise, if you have computer trouble or a clogged toilet, there are ways to rectify the situation at hand. Sure, the answer might be time consuming and it might be costly, but you can find a certain peace of mind knowing somewhere in the present mess lies a solution.
But what about the seemingly unsolvable problems? The ones where even attempting to think of potential solutions feels like a royal waste of time and energy? With this type of limitless mess, it feels like you’re on an uncharted, dirt trail with a dead cellphone, and the nearest whisper of civilization is at least 50 miles away.
You can play the optimistic card and try to convince yourself, “Just because I have absolutely no idea what to do right now, doesn’t mean there’s not a solution to be found.”
But given your circumstances, where do those chipper words really leave you?
For the vast majority of my life, my speech impediment and coordination differences seemed like a perpetual problem that would severely limit, and very possibly ruin, my life. I didn’t ask for birth trauma. It was thrust upon me. This was going to be my life.
For much of my childhood and young adulthood, my greatest wish was to be “normal” like all the other kids. This wish, of course, was impossible to fulfill.
Fast forward to about ten years ago, I was complaining to my friend, Ina, lamenting the life I’d never get an opportunity to know. Abruptly, she stopped me, looked me deep in the eyes and said, “Jason, your voice is a gift.”
Those simple words changed the course of my life. They gave me the sense that I could redefine the way I’d always seen myself, that there might be more to who I was than what I was presently experiencing.
Now, this breakthrough didn’t solve ALL my difficulties. Hardly! It didn’t answer the question of how I could be more at ease with myself or how I could build more confidence and it definitely didn’t change the fact I had a speech impediment. Maybe you’re like me, but so often when I try to solve a complex problem, I feel like I need to discover the full solution in order to solve it successfully.
Ina definitely didn’t give me the full solution, but what she did give me was one of the most wonderful gifts I’ve ever been given. She gave me the sense that I wasn’t as stranded as I had feared, that I actually had the power to seek solutions that might feel good to me, fill me with confidence and set me on a more expansive path in life.
I’m not sure how, or if, this story applies to you or your impossible problems. I imagine, if your most vexing problems had been easy to solve, you would have solved them already. But may this story offer proof that there are ways of thinking and acting on even your most vexing problems that you haven’t yet imagined.
Sometimes our answers lie beyond our own brain power, even when we are totally certain that we can figure it all out.
It took Ina to give me the insight that changed my trajectory.
Just because you feel you’ve tried everything, doesn’t mean that the answers to your problems don’t exist. It simply means you haven’t discovered them yet.
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