Obstacles are Gateways to New Opportunities
Adversity Necessitates Seeking Change for the Better.
Life includes challenges, obstacles, and resistance—not at every turn or all the time, but they are part of life's ever-changing ebb and flow. Daring to search for a better life experience is embracing the power of curiosity and openness. The compulsion to seek understanding, advancement, and solutions is good. Expanding the boundaries of our knowledge, frustrations and what is unacceptable to our current experience is life-affirming.
The willingness to extend ourselves further to see if we can do something we had assumed we couldn't or don't know how to do is admirable. Here, we can discover new realms of possibility, better outcomes, and hidden inner resources. Through exploration, trial and error, and alternative mindsets and approaches we discover gateways to transforming our reality into better experiences. The catalysts propelling us into discovering change often happens in moments of crises and adversity. However, we can always initiate our own search for better ways, experiences, and realities for ourselves.
Reframe the Obstacle into an Opportunity to Grow.
Venturing into the quest for a better life has its obstacles and hardships. Doubt may creep in, and whispers of uncertainty may cloud our judgment, but it is precisely in these moments of doubt that we test our resolve. In the face of uncertainty and setbacks, we honour ourselves by persisting with the courage to press onward, trust our instincts, and believe in our ability to navigate uncharted waters and experience new vistas.
No failure along the way is a dead end but a stepping stone to successfully expanding our exploration. Each setback serves as a lesson learned, and each challenge is an opportunity for growth.
We unlock our full potential through our willingness to embrace failure, learn from our mistakes, listen to those who know better, extend ourselves beyond our current perceived limitations, and adapt to unforeseen circumstances. We discover previously unknown possibilities and experience growth in our internal capacity to deal with life's kaleidoscopic emotions, challenges, and experiences.
Adversity Plunges us into the Unknown without Warning.
In May 2022, while getting ready for a little boy in my apartment building's first birthday, I had a significant functional seizure. My mind, body and emotional composure entirely collapsed. Whatever functionality I had from maintaining everything that worked for me in managing my conditions came undone.
After stumbling through the unknown for two years with whatever help I could get, I can write and read a blog now. My determination to recover my writing ability and finish The Living Canvas Oracle and Shadow Warrior Oracle is why I can write this blog post for a website I never knew I'd have for a mission I'd never conceived myself of being capable.
We Can Do It. There Will be a Way.
"You can do it," is what my physiotherapist had said to me when I lost my ability to read and write after a significant functional seizure in May 2022. All I could do was cry because I'd lost even the capacity to speak a complete sentence. My short-term memory was severely compromised. I couldn't remember what I'd said five words ago or the question I was in the middle of answering. A functional seizure had never affected me this badly or taken me so long to recover from.
Seemingly Insurmountable Obstacles Become new Opportunities.
Part of my recovery was painting with palette knives. All my life, I have loved to create art and did it whenever I could. Then, the whole thing flipped. Painting became all I could do. Painting for mind-body reconnection turned into making the artwork for the Living Canvas Oracle and Shadow Warrior Oracle.
Creating the new artwork for these projects led me to an art studio residency, exhibitions, collaboration, advisors, and Romulus. I now see the devastating and confusing turn of events leading up to the significant functional seizure as pivotal to what my life has been gravitating towards—Romulus.
The Romulus Folio showcases my art and applications, which have always been my first love. The Romulus myth symbolically has such profound personal resonance that I'll share it once it's appropriate.
Discovery Through the Obstacles.
Ultimately, the unknown territories obstacles land us in are not about reaching a destination but rather about the fertile exploration process. Unexpected and unknown opportunities arise, taking us in exciting new directions and greater viewpoints. For example, I thought I lost everything I wanted to hold onto. Instead, I lost nothing but gained so much more.
The lesson is that we think we know the destination or how the next month, year, or decade needs to be for us, but we don't. Life changes on a dime. A negative turns into a positive, and a positive turns into a negative, eventually leading us to a double positive.
Nonetheless, it's so easy to get caught up in having a fixed mindset and inflexible thinking that things must happen a certain way for everything to be ok. It's even easier to get distressed if it doesn't make sense or we don't know how to make things realistically work.
Coping Strategies.
How we deal with the challenges of navigating the unknown will be different for each of us at various times, and that's ok.
Personally, when I'm overwhelmed these days, I paint. That's where I love to be and feel safe when confronted with life's buffet of unknowns, confusions and frustrations. Painting is how I embrace the endless possibilities that lie before me. When I was younger, I walked along the Chelsea beach shore to Carrum and around the Patterson River. In my 20s and early 30s, I dealt with the unknown, fears, confusion and obstacles by writing as if my life depended on it. Now it's painting.
It's essential to identify what our coping strategies are. If they're unhealthy or harmful to us, they need to be replaced with better ones. That's how I overcame a period of addiction to smoking, drinking and misusing pharmaceuticals seventeen years ago. I had no idea I was self-medicating or using these substances as a maladaptive coping mechanism.
Recovering from addiction is how I learned that addiction is an unintentionally self-harming way to cope with experiences, circumstances and situations that seriously distress us or have a traumatic impact. It's ok to need, ask for, and receive professional help. Support is necessary throughout the recovery process. Addiction is nothing to be ashamed of but something we need help working through. Part of working through addiction is learning healthy and self-loving ways to cope with distress, loss, despair, traumatic experiences and overwhelm.
Life has a Way of Putting us all Through the full Spectrum of Human Experience.
Sometimes, we willingly step into finding a better way of life, knowing that true discovery and joyful experiences await beyond the obstacles the barriers present. Other times, life's curveballs plunge us into the great unknown without warning. Moving from what is not best for us to an improved set of circumstances elevating us gives us a greater understanding of ourselves and our capacity.
The value in looking back is to see how far we've come and to show others that there are different possibilities through any obstacle available to them too.