They say "Calm seas make for poor sailors." or conversely "Rough seas make for good sailors."
I am not sure who's saying it is. It is encouraging but it is not something you want to hear while you are busy drowning, never mind on a ship in a storm.
It does however pose to give us comfort after a season of hardship or loss that we have experienced and gives us some personal meaning to having survived through it all. So when you have survived the rough and tough that life throws at you, perhaps you deal with smaller crisis better because of it.
But as I say, this is not perhaps the best thing to say or dwell on while we are actually busy dealing with that storm!
A person cannot appreciate the water in his lungs that is drowning him because it would mean so much… IF he survives! You CAN appreciate the air and the ability to breathe AFTER surviving!
So what do I do when I am currently busy drowning? And of course, I do not mean this in a literal sense. I mean in the figurative. What happens when you are under stress and duress and you are currently experiencing that stress and you need to push forward?
In this case: “Rough seas make for good sailors” and “What does not kill you, makes you stronger” is a poor mind-set to bring comfort and does not motivate perseverance! How do you get on with it? How do you manage to survive after you start panicking?
I do not mean terror. If a bear jumps out of the woods and charges at you and you go into brown-trousers mode… this is not what I am talking about.
The slow and overwhelmed panic of modern society: Long hours, bills to pay, car breakdown, lost relatives, lost pets, trouble or drama with family members… these things, they happen all the time and one or two at a time, they might echo off each other and then when four, five or more of these things hit you all at once and are all active within a span of a few days to a week then you go from challenged, to unbalanced to panicked!
What then?
What does not kill me? Don’t tell me that! At this rate I might very well not make it! I need to first survive before I can look back and appreciate the rough journey.
So… what we need… what I need… is a mind-set that allows me to get through that rough journey.
I find that focussing on small actions and making sure those little actions get done, add up and make things work out in the future. Once in a while you need to raise your head and make sure that you are going in the right direction, but do not give yourself time to think about how rough the journey will be. Do not spend time trying to quantify it and become overwhelmed with the stress of this massive burden.
Rather look down at your two feet and make sure you put one foot before the other. Take a step, a sound one. Make sure your balance is good. Make sure you are stepping on something solid and nothing that is dangerous. Make sure you breathe and then move on to the next step.
You do not want to freeze, overwhelmed and stagnate.
You do not want to run, become hasty and make mistakes.
Just one foot in front of the other. After making consecutive movements one after the next you can look back at what you did and see that you came a long way and that the way before you is a lot easier to deal with because you already completed a lot of it!
So just one more step, one more action, one more page, one more word, one more minute, or one more breath. Take your time and take that breath… and then another.
This is what I think it takes to get through the rough times.
Thank you for reading. I hope everyone get’s through their storms.
Cheers!
@zakludick
Wes & Grindan