There are times when we just feel overwhelmed. Our energy depleted. Our focus distracted. We just don’t feel very good about ourselves.
Sometimes this happens over time. Other times it’s sudden when triggered by a specific, unexpected, and startling event.
We keep grasping at answers and fall more deeply into our own quicksand. Every time we reach up to save ourselves, we fall deeper into our own sorrow. Our frustration grows with our impatience, wondering if we will ever get out of where we are today.
I have been in quicksand that trapped my life. More than once. Around different things. It is so draining. Friends have shared with me their quicksand. Both ways, it’s never about what we can do to get out of it but rather spending each breath describing how bad we feel.
Nothing is working out. All of our hope has been reduced to dust.
And then something happens. We begin to realize that “we are not right”. That something is wrong that we need help with. Our conversations begin to change from “woe is me” to “I don’t know how to breakthrough or change this or that”.
You see our quicksand blinds us from first understanding that we don’t understand how to approach or handle the situations we find ourselves in. Our quicksand feels so unique that it is never seen as something quite common, generic, and has very similar properties for all of us.
When we reach for a helping hand the first time, our egos jump to the front and say “I thought of everything you have told me”. As if I understood what was said. (Being told that you never did any of what was said makes me believe you did not understand what you were told.)
In life, there are only two ways to dry up the quicksand that we sometimes find ourselves in. The first is to act on what we are told to try immediately so that we begin to forget where we have been. Changes brought about by our different actions are the only way to demonstrate to others that we have understood what was said.
The second way, to dry up our quicksand, is to realize that there are things we don’t know but need to learn quickly. More knowledge about things we were not aware of will bring about different actions that will take us in new directions.
Drying up the quicksand in our lives is more about gaining new or different knowledge (with a sprinkle of trust in the new knowledge we have been exposed to) than in our own ability.
Quicksand never leaves us when all we do is look in a mirror. It dries up only when we look out the window to see new things around us and dare to open the door to begin to go where we have never been.