Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. ~Soren Kierkegaard
I used to love crawling down into holes that I’d dug for myself. The sympathy that I’d receive fulfilled needs that I didn’t know how to get met in other ways. It became a familiar routine and to be honest it’s still a story I put into motion from time to time. Being helped feels good but constant rescuing gets old for people.
I started to learn a little bit about “why” I dug holes and climbed down into them through therapy when I was a kid. (Court ordered… we’ll talk about that another time.) I didn’t take it that serious. I just went through the motions and was convinced that the world was happening to me, certainly not for me. I did court ordered therapy several times in my youth. Yeah, several, like I said, life kept happening TO me. I got as much out of therapy during those stints as I put in which wasn’t much but I got some.
Eventually enough cycles of negative outcomes happened forcing me to look at the fact that I was the problem. 99% of the time I am the problem. Realizing this was both good and bad. I didn’t want to be responsible and I kept wanting to run the tired, old song and dance I’d been running so that was hard. The good news was the power that came from taking responsibility. Learning to explore deeper and deeper ownership of my choices gave me a TON of opportunity to shape my life the way I wanted.
I learned and now know a lot about commitments, discipline, and routines. The thing about all these is that they’re created by a long series of choices. Making certain choices shapes life one way or the other, so the more of those that can get strung together the greater the ability to make changes in whatever way we choose.
If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging. This quote has been said by many. When it finally hit me a light bulb went off in my head. Stopping digging was the initial intervention I needed. The next thing to do was figure out how to get myself out of there in a healthy and functional way. For me I got a fair bit out of actually being in the hole so I had to learn about getting my needs met in higher quality ways.
The point here is to get really clear on the little drama that we enact around what causes us to crawl down in holes in our lives today, why our childhood bullshit provokes that, and how to climb out. Once we know that framework it’s time to move towards living life going forward and stop running laps on the past. Move on! Each of us is going to revert back and default. We’ll drop down several stratus in consciousness and do it again but we just climb out and move on. It’s time to live life moving forward.
The future holds lots of opportunity as well as risks, we’ll talk about the anxiety of living in the future soon.
The opportunity:
Why do you crawl in holes?
How do you get yourself out?
What are you avoiding by staying in the holes you dig?
What risk do you need to take moving forward?
Thanks for your time, have a great day!