When it comes to peace of mind/happiness/wellbeing/contentment, us humans seem to be wired to look in the wrong place.
We look for all of these things outside of us, when they’re actually already within us.
Indeed you could go as far as saying they are us (or we are them).
It’s like the old Sufi joke, where the drunk is crawling around under a streetlamp. When a stranger asks him if he needs help, he replies,
“I lost my keys! I can’t find them!”
“Where did you last see them?” asks the stranger.
“Oh, I dropped them in that field over there,” he says, pointing off into the darkness.
“Then why are you looking for them under this streetlamp?” asks the stranger, baffled.
“The light’s better here!” comes the reply.
Classic.
This hit home for me the other day, when my daughter calls me over towards the end of her cycling practice.
“Dad, the gears aren’t working. I think they’re broken.”
I instantly know what the problem is, because I'm the cause. I’d been doing a bit of maintenance the previous day and had changed the front gears from the smallest chainring, up to the middle one. Then forgot to change them back.
All session, she’d been pedalling around in much harder gears than she was used to.
But—crucially—she only knows how to change the gears on the rear cassette. (She’s never really got her head round the front chainrings, so they’re largely invisible to her.)
And changing the gears at the back wasn’t giving her the results she wanted.
“I’ve tried everything. They just won’t go low enough. I even tried changing while pedalling backwards, but that just made a horrid noise.”
😬😱
As I reach to change the front gears back for her, I'm chastised.
“Dad, no. It’s the back gears. I told you.”
I continue. Wishing to just sort it out quickly so we can both move on with our lives.
She gets cross with me.
“Dad, stop it! The back gears aren’t working. I’ve told you. They need fixing! Don’t mess with the others – stop it!”
CLICK!
⚙️ ⤵️
Order, and super-low gearing, are immediately restored.
She doesn't really understand what's just happened, she just knows everything's much better now and her bike works again.
That whole session… all her attention was zoomed in on the rear gears (that were working just fine), thinking there was something wrong with them.
Trying to fix something that wasn’t broken.
When the solution was hidden in plain sight, all along… just outside of what her mind knew.
Ring any bells?
💟
Giles
By its very nature, stuff that’s ‘outside of what your mind knows’ is invisible to you. Which is human and normal and fine. And it’s why it’s so powerful to explore your problems with a professional who’s used to pointing people in the right direction, so that those problems get resolved. (That’s me, BTW, hi 👋🏻)
So if you’ve tried everything and life’s still not working how you want it to, then consider getting in touch so we can tackle it together: CLICK! ⚙️
(Getting cross with me is optional 😉)