Pull From The Roots

We all encounter hardships in life. Setbacks. Bumps in the road. Unanticipated changes in course. We may not always be able to control what happens to us, but we can control how we react.

So when we encounter hardships in life, what can we do?

Let’s start by talking about gardening. Anyone familiar with gardening knows that if you don’t pull out a weed with its roots it will simply pop back up again. The roots need to come out for the problem to go away. If we pull off what we can see we do little to solve the problem and that weed will eventually rear its ugly head again.

Gardening! Splendid. But, how can we apply this to our life?

Hardships are life’s version of weeds. If we try to solve them by addressing only what we see we do little but waste time. We need to understand what is causing our hardships, rather than just pulling the tops of the weeds.

So what does this mean?

We need to take a look at our hardships and go deeper to understand what is causing them. We have to take time and peer into ourselves to see what is going on. Are we having interpersonal problems with friends? We could be more sensitive due to a recently developed insecurity. We need to understand that there may be something going on below the surface that we are not aware of that is driving our behavior. Are we having trouble staying focused or spending more time on social media? Could it be that we feel lost over our direction in life and rather than facing the problem we hide?

Ask yourself the hard questions not to hurt yourself, but to liberate yourself.