The truly wise, enlightened individual is capable of allowing any situation to blow through them. They live in the moment as it comes, and then they move on. They treat life's mountainous molehills the way they were meant to be treated - as bumps and potholes on their path.
The truly wise, enlightened individual understands that sometimes these challenges are unavoidable. Sometimes attempting to avoid an uncomfortable situation can do more damage than the uncomfortable situation ever could. Sometimes the damage is so severe that none of the parties involved can ever be the same again.
It's the moments like this that I thank the source of everything for my talent with the written word, because I started off this post with an incorrect mindset. I started this off thinking that there were two different kinds of people in the world - those who can go through pretty much anything and not suffer for it, and those who absorb everything that happens to them and never let anything go. That's where the title of this post came from. I likened individuals of the latter description to sponges. It's appropriate, is it not? A sponge is soft and porous, capable of absorbing most things very effectively but not nearly as good at expelling them. You can wring a sponge out all you want, but once you have used it to clean out a rusty cast iron pan, that sponge is never going to see anything you eat off of ever again.
I realize now that all people are sponges. Some people are just better at wringing themselves out and moving on to the next challenge while others avoid challenges like the plague after the first few uncomfortable situations. They sit and let the remnants of whatever they have gone through solidify within themselves; eventually they either crack and crumble under the pressure or they push their issues up to the surface for everyone to see and use them as a form of armor. The only problem is that armor keeps out everything, including anything or anyone that might help them overcome their issues.
Some individuals who have the gall to call themselves motivational speakers would like us to believe that we make a conscious decision to be miserable. I think they do it this way because they believe that by convincing us that we consciously chose misery, they can more easily get us to accept that we can consciously choose to be happy and successful; and just like that it will be so. It is a flawed, but very easy way to get stupid people to start to see the light. If you take even five minutes to think about this suggestion critically you are going to come to the realization that they're talking pap, and if you have lived through unfortunate circumstances you had little control over you might even be offended.
Who can blame you? Life is simply not that black or white. Shitty circumstances are completely random. People don't choose circumstances - circumstances choose people. Did I choose to be born to parents who were too damned old and too damned self-absorbed to ever be capable of good parenting? Hell no. That was luck of the draw plain and simple; however, what I did choose was how to deal with it. Up to this point, I would say I have done that rather poorly. I'm not about to keep beating myself up for it though - it's virtually impossible to deal with a situation you've never experienced before flawlessly, and that's one thing armchair experts are never willing to admit. Every day you wake up is another opportunity to take another step forward, another step closer to that destiny you dream of but don't have the courage to chase. Work it up, Buttercup, because life doesn't wait for you. If you sit and stew in your old shit for too long you stagnate and moving forward gets even harder. On top of that, you then also have the challenge of learning to live with the knowledge of what you might have accomplished if you had only moved sooner.
Anyone who might decide to read this blog of mine from the beginning might notice a growing trend at this point. Many of my posts seem to be somehow incomplete, missing the moral I seem to be building towards. There is a reason for that. I'm not here to offer morals. What I'm here to do is offer observations from the mindset that motivators have to learn how to properly deal with. There are a lot of beautiful minds hidden out in the world, allowed to slip through the cracks because of regulations designed on the assumption that everyone can adapt to a system designed for the plebeian majority. Not everyone can accept, "I'll decide what you need to know, you just worry about memorizing it."
It's the responsibility of the individual to learn what they need to do to deal with challenges effectively. They need to see doctor after doctor, adviser after adviser until they find those with the tools and wisdom that rings true to them. Some people never will find their own personal Three Wise Men because they aren't meant to. Some people were born only to live as an example for other people. They might simply be weak-willed as a result of poor genetics, or they might be serving their time in purgatory for crimes committed in other lives. In my quest for truth, I have learned that it's never a good idea to make assumptions about things I can never hope to fully understand.
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