When we face difficult choices, difficult situations, and difficult
conditions, we must drop the designation of ‘difficult’ or any other mental
designation. By designating aspects of our life as difficult, easy or
otherwise, we’re imposing mental limitations on our life and our ability to
act; we’re blocking our awareness of reality and alternative perspectives.
Through mental designation, we’re categorizing and itemizing
our life, eliminating objectivity, limiting scope and paralyzing action. This
is what the mind does when left without direction: this is working for us; that
is acting against us, these don’t affect us whatsoever. Our mind wants to
categorize everything because it makes it easier to ignore choices, situations
and conditions moving forward.
There are benefits from allowing the mind to act in this
manner. Designating or categorizing can make us more efficient and can yield
increased effectiveness by limiting mental effort before action. This is very
useful when dealing with common nuisance or irritations. We can turn the volume
down on these common, everyday concerns. However, some people choose to turn
the volume up on what is truly out of their control, like weather, people or
chronic conditions. By turning up the volume on these common occurrences, it
drowns the mind, making it unable to see what we can affect and change.
We can explore how this mental path can go horribly wrong as
there are countless examples of how what used to work doesn’t work today. Think
about old computers from the 80s or even 90s. If we use these old computers
today, we may not even be able to get the computer to do anything we need it to
do. It may be unable to connect to the internet, or would be so slow that it’s
impossible to get anything done. This doesn’t mean the computer wasn’t useful,
but it’s no longer useful in what we need to do today. The same can be said
about old ways of thinking about our life and our environment.
Consider the public policy dilemmas our elected officials
are grappling with today. Each side seemingly dug in on their old ideas of how
to govern, yet both sides are unable to get anything accomplished. Many aspects
of American life have changed, yet both sides continue to apply old politics to
the predicaments in which America finds itself today. Policies that seemed
acceptable to both sides just a few years ago are unable to be enacted today.
Each side is frozen in time, looking at our common problems in the same ways as
they did a decade ago. It simply is not working.
The same can be said about our own life strategies. We’re
dug in on seeing life and others in the same ways as before. Often, we do not
consider our life fulfilled and happy, and we are behaving, thinking and
feeling about our life as we have done before. It is up to us to behave, think
and feel differently about it moving forward. If we do not think differently,
our life will be no different than on any other day.
If we feel powerless or hopeless, we’re not seeing our own role
in our own life. Our designations have been misplaced and are not helping our
situation or altering our conditions. The most powerful tool we have is our
perspective. The old ways of thinking have not yielded results lately; our previous
designations may have lost their use. The only avenue toward clarification is
to review our assumptions and designations moving forward, and to do so
robustly.
We can do something different with our life, right here and
right now. We need only challenge our old assumptions and designations.
Perhaps, we’re missing an aspect of our current situation that would make life
so much easier. Perhaps, we’re making our situation worse through repeating old
patterns that may have worked in the past. Perhaps, we can discover new ways to
tackle old and new problems alike. We will only know if we let go of these
assumptions and designations and explore anew. We will only know if we work at increasing
our understanding.
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