"Life’s challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they’re supposed to help you discover who you are."— Bernice Johnson Reagon
When I was a kid I used to enjoy watching my favorite cartoon show. It was a show that I used to watch everyday after school. I've always looked forward to watching the show. Well, one day I got home, turned on the television, and sure enough my favorite cartoon was just ending. "I've just missed the episode." This part is not clear. I'm not sure if the network moved up the cartoon show an hour early or my last class was let out an hour later. I was bummed out about this. Well, one day I was walking home from school thinking maybe if I just ran home, then I could see the last few minutes of the show. I don't remember the exact grade I was in when all this was happening. All I remember that I was in middle school, which included the sixth, seventh, and eight grade. After thinking of this, I started running home and found that I was rewarded with the last 10 minutes of the cartoon show. So the next school day, after the last and final bell rang, I immediately ran home. When I got home I was rewarded the last 15 minutes of the show. I was the first to get home before my parents and younger sister. So it was just me alone watching my favorite cartoon show. I can't recall the distance from school to home, but everyday after school, I ran home to watch my cartoon show, not realizing how this was going to affect me later on.
Well, later on that year, during my physical education course, the PE teacher decided to introduce us to running. We were asked to run from the beginning of a field down to the end of the field. I didn't think anything of it. I don't remember how many of us were there, but I know it was of few. At the starting line, the coach yelled, "On your mark, get set and GO!" Although at the beginning of the race it was pretty much crowded, the crowd began to dwindle down much to my surprised. Then I began to notice it was I and another PE student leading the race towards the finish line. He finished first place and I second place. I was very surprised that I placed at all until I realized that all the running home from school I did unexpectedly paid off.
In the story above, I demonstrated that in spite of obstacles we can push through to our goals. We can find a way to fulfill a desire or a wish. And along the way, we can discover new things about ourselves we didn't know before.
What Can We Learn From Obstacles?
We shouldn't see obstacles as our nemesis but rather as a way to measure ourselves. Obstacles can tell us how we're growing in our personal journey. We have all experienced obstacles in our own unique way. Obstacles aren't meant for us to fail but are meant for us grow into what we want to be in our lives. Obstacles chip away the edges of our biases as long as we have a stick-to-it-ness attitude. It is easy to have the attitude in the classic Aesop's Fables of the fox who couldn't reach the grapes and only to give up by saying that those grapes were sour anyway. Instead, we can have the attitude that we can learn something about ourselves about how we deal with obstacles, and about how we dealt with obstacles in the past. Our past is our resources of experiences up to now that we can use to fulfill our dreams and desires.
Where Do We Find A Way To Fulfill Our Desires?
It is through our resources that we can fulfill our desires. We have a lifetime of experiences that we have accumulated over the years that no one can take away. These experiences are the result of all of our lifetime learnings. These are learnings that started in our inception, then continued after our birth and continue on for as long as we live. When we were toddlers we first discovered that we had arms to move and hands to pick up things with and to put into our mouths, we went from crawling the floors to walking and then finally running wherever our legs could take us. As our brains began to develop, we could sort out things within the criteria that were our own. We could see things in our own unique world that we've developed as we've accumulated more learning experiences. These learning experiences become second nature. The learning experiences that were once in the forefront of our minds, are now sent to the back of minds.
Now we are at the speed at which our learnings have slowed down since we've been adults. We've experienced being stuck because we've become set in our ways but now we have a desire to want to change but don't know how. And we find ourselves forgetting that we do have a storehouse of resources that we can tap into to help to make change so that we can fulfill our wants or our desires in our lives. The treasure is the resource of experiences that each and every one of possesses. We just have to be reminded of our struggles to learn how to walk, or our struggles to learn how to read our first book, or our struggles to learn how to ride our first bike, or our struggles to learn how to do anything new that's before us. This is good news because we can look back to see in our past that we have gone through each struggle in which we can build upon and we can make today's struggles easier to handle. This is our newfound mind-set.
What things Can We Discover About Ourselves?
It is through our struggles we have experienced new learnings and, discover something about ourselves along the way. We've discovered we can do some things better than other things. We've discovered what our strengths are as well as our weaknesses. We've discovered that we have certain biases against certain subjects while open towards other subjects. We've discovered that we do have limitations but we don't have to yield to them to meet our goals. We've discovered that we do have fears but that we can continue on in spite of them. We've discovered that what we feel is not always what's real. We've discovered that our belief that we are limited is an assumption that we haven't truly tested yet.
Here is a question we may want to ask yourself, can you think of an experience that you've learned in one area of your life and was proven useful in another area of your life?