When you have a headache or are feeling upset about something, what’s your go-to thing to do?
You seek relief, right?
Many of us are quick to pop a pill, phone a friend, or revert to immediate gratification in an attempt to feel better fast. But that is often doing ourselves a disservice and missing the point of the pain.
Don’t get me wrong - there’s a time and place for a quick fix, but if all you’re doing is just trying to get rid of the pain or problem, you’ll keep running into it because life is a bitch like that. And it’s there to teach you.
Case in point: I have recently been feeling extremely frustrated and fed up of all the work I’ve been doing on myself, and in my career, feeling stuck and like I couldn’t do what I wanted. I was VERY close to throwing in the towel and angrily taking myself off to join all the other lost souls in Bali or Thailand in search of feeling better.
(The irony being that wherever we go, we take our problems with us).
But that deep frustration (or rather, let’s call it what it was - an existential crisis) was serving a purpose. It made me question everything - myself, the universe and the purpose of life, confront my ego and ask myself some important questions about what I truly want, and examine my expectations.
Only in going through that discomfort was I able to ask those questions, see the bigger picture, and shift my perspective.
Sitting with the discomfort and asking those questions revealed greater clarity on my purpose (to help people enjoy their lives more, bring joy and make people laugh in the process). It also helped me realise that I’ve been too impatient, too afraid to take risks - and the two were cancelling each other out. Hence the stuckness.
If I had gone for the quick fix, I would have had short term relief but prolonged grief. And my ’stuckness’ would have grumbled away in the background as I avoided looking at monster I’d created.
Sometimes we just have to sit with our pain and ask ourselves the purpose it’s serving, and other key questions. It all serves a purpose, it’s up to us to find what it is...