ცვლილება

sometimes I'm the person in the queue for the bus and I'm pushing and straining to get on the bus, and, once I'm on the bus, I no longer care about moving down the bus so more people can get on. I'm on, and that's all that matters. 

I'm not actually like that with buses but I'm like that with some of the challenges in life. Like, I just want to get through it and I think there's nothing good about this, but I've been thinking lately about both during intense challenges and after them and how I can see them differently. 

it's easy for me to not learn from challenges. when I'm going through the challenge, I just want relief, and then I get some relief and I'm just focused on that, and it's easy, at that point to think - great, now I can go back to normal, but what I've been realising is that that going back to normal leads into more challenge. The point of the challenge is to give me an opportunity to change. 

So, I've been learning two things. Firstly, challenges are not the worst thing in the world. I have a tendency to think, when I'm going through a challenge, that everything is going wrong. But I've been reflecting lately, when I've gone through challenges, that, even at that point when the challenge is at its most intense (or seems to be), things could be worse, and at times in the past, they actually have been worse, and also, not everything is going wrong. In many ways I'm doing OK. 

The other thing I've been thinking about is the way I respond when relief comes. This also relates to how I see the problem because, if I see the problem as the worst thing in the world, then I will overvalue relief from that problem and I will overindulge in it - it will become too important to me...I will become reliant on, maybe addicted to, whatever it is that brought relief. If I see the problem as the worst thing in the world and I'm obsessively thinking about how I can get rid of it // how I can get back to the way things were or the way I want them to be, when relief comes, I'm just going to go there - back to my habitual ways of thinking and acting, back to what I know ||| and, if I do that, I will miss the lesson that the challenge has for me.