I had a moment this week where I questioned why we seem to have to conduct an ongoing investigation in our life in order to get answers. What am I really doing? Why is this happening? Why does everything seem to be working against me? Why did they / didn’t they do that? Why does everything have to be so flippin hard?!!

I wondered, why don’t get these answers in advance? Why do we sometimes find ourselves so fed up with everything, we have an overwhelming desire to crawl under a rock (or back into our bubbles) and stay there… Indefinitely! It can be so tempting and often easier to just give up and say “I quit! It’s too hard, I give up!” and sadly a lot of people do. I realised this happens more the older we get and doesn’t seem to be something we are born feeling.

We stumble through life, trying to work things out by trial and error, failing at so many things the first time we try, or at least having to work hard to actually get there… wherever ‘there’ is.

This seems to start from very early on. Babies need to cry in order to get something or the attention of someone. As we grow up we get louder and more demanding in our requests to be heard. A toddler continues to fall down before they learn to balance on wobbly legs and walk and then discover they can run! They hadn’t counted on that every time they fell down. It seems the younger we are the harder we will work and it’s almost like we don’t know any better. It’s seems a natural reaction or instinct, something triggers in our mind, that we just keep going, we just keep getting up, we just keep persisting.

I have never heard of a toddler learning to walk that decided, “you know what, this is all too hard, I’m just going to sit over there for the rest of my life. Walking probably isn’t all it’s cracked up to be anyway and to be honest I can’t be bothered!”. The toddler gets up again and again and again as many times as they have to until the job is done. As verbal communication skills develop frustration increases, working hard again to make the big people around them understand what they are saying. They don’t stop talking just because people don’t understand them.

I had a conversation with someone this week and we were discussing the need for everyone to be ‘stroked’. She went on to say that in the study of psychology, it has been proven that we need to be stroked in some way, either positively or negatively, conditionally or unconditionally. Any type of stroke is better than no stroke at all. Perhaps some of us develop quicker than others, the ability to give ourselves the stroke we need as a human instead of requiring an increasing amount of stroking from others to feel validated.

You may have heard the saying, “there is always a light at the end of the tunnel”. Many years ago, in the early hours of the morning, as my sister and I drank wine and solved many of the problems of the universe (some things haven’t changed), this phrase was clarified for me. Most people I believe don’t know the end of the sentence so here it is. “There is always a light at the end of the tunnel, BUT, sometimes we just need to go down there and flick the switch”.

So maybe Ben’s message this week is, even though you are (I am) frustrated, don’t quit. We don’t know how it will turn out yet. Just because you (I) don’t think people are listening, don’t stop talking, they haven’t heard us yell yet. Don’t give up when you are trying to walk, we haven’t experienced running yet. And at the end of the day, take the time to do something nice for someone else, say something nice or just give them a smile, we have no idea what a difference it could make!

Much Love Dalya xx💙