Elephants, stealthy creatures one and all, have been cropping up a lot lately, so I’m running with the theme.
What’s the elephant in your room?
We all have big, nasty problems that are either horribly current or just around the corner. We know they need to be dealt with, tackled, met head-on with a stiff upper lip; but instead we choose to pretend they’re not there, in the hopes they’ll just go away if we wish hard enough.
Now, sometimes this does work! Usually when the problem is time-based, or contingent on a decision, and the “la la la” approach wastes enough time to make it all moot. Oh, I’ve been guilty of this, but I always feel terrible afterwards. Instead of facing up to the situation, I just let it… happen without me. Instead of taking the risk, I wait until the risk isn’t a question, and convince myself I wanted the safe route all along. (So even when the approach works, it doesn’t work satisfactorily).
I started feeling a lot better about the elephants in my life when I started confronting them, though. It turns out half the time they’re not even elephants at all, but out of the corner of my eye, when I’m looking the other way, they seem gargantuan, insurmountable and infinite. Turns out when you start looking closer, they’re really quite manageable.
