Sari's Friday Connection

Friday thoughts from Sari

In the journey through life with the challenges of adult ADD, one sometimes confronts pain, loss, or disappointment. I have found that counter intuitively, if you can accept these struggles as natural in life, it helps you relax a little and ironically, can give you new energy. When you stop fighting so hard against your struggles, you can put your resources instead into moving in the direction you want to go. If you do this, you can begin to take away meaning from the obstacles put in your way. Sometimes we are forced by circumstances to move in a new direction not of our own choosing.

If instead of railing against these circumstances, we can examine what mysteries they might hold for us, we might find ourselves in new territory that would have remained undiscovered or possibilities we would have never imagined.

 Sometimes when I take a wrong turn and get temporarily lost driving down an unfamiliar road or an unplanned route, instead of berating myself, I have begun to wonder to myself instead, “what chance encounter might I have  because of this or what new piece of information might I see on a sign that I would have missed otherwise by always taking the same familiar path or  coasting along on autopilot.

Next time you get injured, or ill, and are forced to slow down or change course, you might give this a try. I have recently found it helpful to try understand what life is offering instead of always fighting against it. This is not the same as resignation or passivity or denying feelings of frustration or disappointment or hurt. Instead, true acceptance, which means literally to  “take what is offered”, is  a way of treating the world gently, politely, or respectfully, like you would do as a good guest who is offered something unfamiliar by your host.