Moving Forward, Trust Yourself
Have you been stuck before?
Truly stuck in your head. With a running list of what isn’t going right. There is power in perspective. There are lessons in the rough patches. No matter where you are today, there is a way forward.
Today was beautiful, the trees were glistening, the air was warm, yet crisp. And I was walking my usual afternoon loop with Sydney, my 10 year old Golden Retriever who never barks and only loves people and getting her belly rubbed, which always clears my head. The best form of self care. But today I made the mistake of listening to the news in my car ride over the hill.
Instead of my usual refreshing steps, my head was filled with all the woes of the world: inflation, war, food scarcity, midterm elections, climate crisis, mental health crisis. Have you been there? Meaning to step outside, take care of you?
The woods are my space to clear my head. Time to breathe in and out, look up at the sky, calm my nerves, walk it out.
Walk it out.
And just as I reached a point of soulful gratitude and quietness, I realized Sydney was nowhere to be found.
I called her. I used her special code word “TREAT”.
But, no answer. I thought, “She must be in the water hole up ahead. Yay, a small swampy pond. This will be fun, Jenny.”
Suddenly I hear the rustling of leaves and looked down the steep slope to see her tangled in a valley of thorns.
The entire side of the hill is a briar patch of thorny bushes and she is at the bottom.
For a good twenty minutes I proceed to call her, try to have her wiggle her way out, calling “treat” and “dinner” to lure her.
Much to my dismay, I realize I have to go down, in and through the thorny bushes. Annoyed and getting scratched up hand and ankle, I move closer to see her crouching down. Is she sad? Poor baby. I am almost through the thick of it. Close enough to reach out and leash her now, and what does she do?
She immediately turns and leaps over a thorny bush, jumping in to the water and swims around the big rock. In a matter of 30 seconds, she is now sitting, stoically on top of the rock, glancing down at me. It’s as if she had her escape route planned the entire time, but did not think to share this with me.
I finagled my way out the patch, stomping my way up the hill, through the thorny bushes, cursing my dog.
The humor here is that she got caught in rough spot. Or so I thought. And I went in to save her. Yet, she had a strategy for exiting the entire time.
Ahhh… so many lessons to learn from this right here.
Briar patches, thorny patches come about all the time in life. And sometimes we can get stuck. Sometimes for too long. And sometimes the most logical way out is what your intuition says to do: to figure it out yourself, to talk it out, to walk it out, to move out of your own way.
If there is something you have to get after, or change up, don’t get stuck in the briar patch for too long. Change it up. Turn around. Look up. Find perspective. Get out of your own way and move on.
I’m cheering for you,
