You Can’t Read the Label From Inside the Bottle
A few days ago, I had someone ask me if I was a skier or a snowboarder. When I told him I was, he suggested that perhaps the reason I was stuck was that I was too busy looking at the trees around me instead of the path through them that would take me to the bottom of the mountain.
Another way to say this would be that you cannot read the label from inside the bottle.
His firm kick to the nuts landed perfectly, and I left our conversation with a new perspective.
And that’s the FUCKING POINT. Sometimes, probably more often than we admit to ourselves, we need a new perspective.
Getting lost or stuck seems like a pretty common challenge. Maybe it’s literal but you’re to proud to ask for directions. Or maybe you find yourself stuck in a relationship, an unfilling career, or you’ve found youreslf with a chronic case of the doldrums.
First things first, know that it happens to the best of us.
A few years back, I found myself in one of those unfortunate situations. I knew I couldn’t sustain the current situation but I also couldn’t see a way out. Every turn, from inside the bottle, just seemed to lead to another shitty outcome.
So I found myself having a conversation with a professional perspective maker. Other people might call this a head doc, a shirnk, or a therapist. But for me, he was was a professional perspective maker.
He said, ”Buddy, you can stay where you are and you will become the most miserable asshole on earth. The kind of asshole that turns into the kind of old man who yells at the neighbors for letting their dog take a dump in his yard. Or, you can do something different and you experience earth shatteing guilt.”
I said, ”Doc, those are some pretty shitty options.”
He said ”No they’re not. We always choose guilt.”
I must have looked pretty damn confused because I had no ability to understand his logic, so he offered ”we can fix guilt…”
I looked up at him from my confusion and simply said ”how?”
He said, ”go be happy.”
Going in being happy wasn’t someting I could see from inside the bottle.
In the days, months, and years that have passed since I met that perspective maker, his words have never left me. I still have moments when I am lost or am stuck, or when I’m too focused on the trees instead of the trail, but I have learned the power of perspective making. I’ve learned the power of calling an audible.
Let’s face it, shit doesn’t always go as we plan. Sometimes we end up in a place we never intended to be, and that can be pretty fucking difficult. Hopeless even.
But each of us were born with an internal GPS. Call it God, Allah, Mother Nature, the Voice, or whatever works for you, but it’s built into the wiring of each of us. Just like the GPS on your phone, sometimes it’s going to tell you to take a direction that makes no sense to you. But if you don’t listen to it, you’re just going to be stuck in traffic. Just like Apple Maps, your internal GPS may take you a direction that makes no sense in the moment, but learn to trust it, it will eventually lead you where you were meant to go.
But here’s the thing, Apple Maps won’t tell you how to get unstuck unless you turn it on. Apple Maps, in this scenario, is the perspective maker.
So what are you doing to find perspective? Who are you talking to? Or are you not talking to anyone and trying to figure it out on your own? Maybe you need a head doc. Maybe you need a hike in the mountains. Maybe you need a long drive with the windows down. Maybe you need to turn off your phone completely and just allow your heart the space and silence to do what’s in inherrently capable of doing.
Whatever it is, give yourself permission to get some perspective. Trust the process. You’ll get where you are supposed to be, even if you have no fucking clue how to do so from where you sit right now.
Travel light, friend. Everything’s going to be ok.