For the longest time I always heard people say that ‘people can’t change.’ That couldn’t be further from the truth. We all learn, develop and grow at different speeds. There’s lessons to learn every single day of our lives, it’s just a matter of opening our eyes and ears and finding them. However, you also have to be WILLING to learn them!
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink, right? Well, the lessons we’re each individually meant to learn can be clearly laid out in front of us each and every day, but we are refusing (or too stubborn) to recognize them. I mentioned earlier today in Saturday’s Affirmation post that I planned on elaborating on repetitive patterns in our lives. Basically, here’s the deal:
For years I was repetitively told to stop taking things so personally. This was in any context you could think of. When I was a nanny and my boss walked in and was having a bad day, I immediately assumed I did something wrong. I always thought it was my fault, all the time. It rarely was – truthfully it had nothing to do with me at all. I was being pretty self-consumed and narcissistic to think everything was always about me.
At the time I never thought of it as being like that – they were mere innocent, helpless thoughts pondering what I did and how I could fix it. To make a long story short, it took years and years of being told “stop taking it personally, it has nothing to do with you” over and over by many different people during many different times in my life when finally it all clicked. But it never clicked when I was bluntly being told to my face. No, of course not. It clicked after reading it in an article somewhere else one random day.
So essentially it was my stubbornness that got in the way of me learning this pertinent lesson. I was evoking so many different emotions of frustration, guilt, sadness, worry, fear from feeling like I had done something wrong, when in reality it never had anything to do with me at all. I was having selfish feelings. Yes….they are selfish feelings. I made them all about me.
The problem had nothing to do with me – that’s if there was a problem at all. It had to do with the other person. I was taking on the other person’s problems as my own without even knowing it. I was making them mine and creating feelings through assumptions. I spent years with these emotions when the answer was staring me in the face: Stop taking it personally! I needed to change – God wanted me to change. It was screaming at me from every angle but guess what…I was that dumb horse staring at the water but refusing to drink it or worse, wondering WTF it was!
Sometimes the answers are right in front of us – God knows the lessons are. Open your eyes, your ears and pay attention. There’s always something we need to be working on. There’s always going to be parts of us that need to grow – mentally, physically, spiritually, emotionally. Don’t allow stubbornness to stand in the way of your journey – it merely acts as a road block and delays your progress until you figure out a way to hurdle over it. Embrace these lessons, face them head-on and be open to change because change is good and it needs to happen for us to grow along our paths.
