One of the biggest and best shifts I have made in my life to date is seeing frustration as a flashlight instead of a dark aspect of life. I was taught all my life, and accepted in my core, that I have the ability to make my life what I want it to be. I just have to work hard, follow the rules, and when I retire, my life will be easy, great, and exactly what I want it to be.
I set my expectations and worked my ass off to get to the point that I could retire, early. Boy was I disappointed, extremely frustrated, and to top it all off, I had no idea why!
I sat down in 2016 and wrote out some specifics of what I wanted my life to look like compared to what it actually looked like. I was 41 years old and I was struggling in so many ways. I was dealing with so many things not being the way I wanted them to be and I was feeling very frustrated, angry, bitter, and more than a little bit depressed.
Writing objectively was how I had worked through things most of my life. Write out the problem, then write out possible solutions. Read through it all to come up with, from the multiple options, a solution I could do and live with (or, just accept that they are, can’t change them, and move on). In this particular instance, I was trying to determine where and how my life was off track so I could realign things and get back on track.
Life was supposed to be my bitch by the time I turned 40. I was supposed to be well on my way to having stability, security, and the freedom to do what I wanted with my life. Here I was at 41, single, mostly free of parental responsibilities because my kids were grown up and on their own, working from home, and yet, still struggling with life. There was something very wrong with that picture.
It was in that moment that the concept that I’m about to share with you hit me like a ton of bricks, made me sad and sick, but at the same time really changed my life. It’s not just the fact that my thinking was wrong (it certainly was), but that our entire societal system has been built on that exact line of thinking, and it’s what I taught my own children. If we work our asses off to get “enough”, we will reach a point that life will suddenly change completely and be “so easy”.
Here is the real, bottom line, problem with that line of thinking.
Disappointment– The result of what we expect not being what we get.
Disappointment is the most common cause of stress, illness, and disease in life.
My expectation was that there would be a point that life would become free of stress and struggle simply because I had done enough. I’d worked enough. I’d saved enough. I’d loved enough. I’d given enough. I had retired early, due to a combined having to take an extended period of time off due to illness and a decision to figure things out so I did not have to go back to a corporate life unless I was the boss and could be flexible enough to work around my illness.
The Universal Truth here is Life has no concept of “enough”. It doesn’t lay out quotas in advance and then cap stresses and struggles when you reach a certain age, contract a disease, hit a predetermined number of traumas, etc. It just does what it does, has always done, and will always do. Be Life.
As people who live lives, we have 2 choices.
1) Accept the Universal Truth and set our expectations accordingly so we are pleased, satisfied, and happy with life more often.
2) Set our expectations of life to be what we want it to be because it is what we want and be disappointed more often than not.
When I realized that, I laughed out loud, and then cried my eyes out for days. That’s a very hard and painful truth, but it is truth. My ego pitched an absolute fit. Throwing things at me like “all that time wasted”, “what ifs”, “should haves”. All signs of frustration because I can’t change that one Universal Truth, no matter how much I want to.
Most of us try to get away from or avoid frustration. It is a very bad, dark, ugly feeling. We don’t enjoy it. We don’t seek it out. It just kind of finds us where we are and makes a mess of things. We can’t think straight, we can’t function right. We have to work harder, invest more time, energy, and money in it than we already have.
We also widely seem to believe that in order to live a life full of light, there can be no darkness. We push it away, ignore it, pretend it doesn’t exist or that we don’t ever experience it. Doing so conflicts with our beliefs that light is good, dark is bad, and we have a very hard time seeing ourselves as having any “bad parts”. We also refuse to believe that the bad, dark, ugly things can be good for us so we cannot accept and believe that they can help us in any way.
When I understood that frustration is not bad, dark, and ugly in itself, but instead a signal that my expectations have been set and are in opposition with a Universal Truth, it became a flashlight for me. Like the check engine light on my car coming on to let me know something is not as it should be. I can fix it, but I need to get under the hood, examine the situation, and make adjustments, so I can get on my way. Or I can ignore it, just jump in and go, and be extremely upset when I find myself sitting on the side of the road waiting for AAA.
I look for the darkness and I embrace it so I can learn from it. I celebrate it’s existence because I am not whole, all that I can be, and helpful to anyone without it. It is one half, if not more than half of who and what I am because while I have come a long way, I still have a long way to go to become the full light being that I am supposed to be.
Reflecting on my own journey, I’ve come to see frustration not as a hindrance, but as a guiding light illuminating areas where my expectations clash with universal truths. I’m curious to hear from you: What aspects of your life could benefit from a ‘flashlight’ approach? How do you navigate moments of frustration and darkness in your journey?”
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