There are times when I have been enveloped in darkness. What I mean is that I am in a situation where I have no clue what to do. There is no choice to make because nothing can be seen. Have you been driving along and suddenly came into a thick fog? It is unnerving to not be able to see the road or obstacles. The eyes strain to see but they cannot. All senses are on alert. The body tenses up. You are in a state of stress. Perhaps you know exactly what it is like to be in a foggy situation.
I have been in the wilderness on a starless night when it is as they say, pitch black. The loss of a flashlight would be disastrous. This is not the envelope of darkness I am referring to though. What happens in life when we need an option? We need to know the right choice, or some choice, any choice really, but there is nothing but darkness. What to do in times like this? How do we navigate through life during these times when we are in the fog?
When I am hiking deep in the wilderness, far from stores, hospitals and phone service it is easy to get lost. Getting from one place to another out there requires skill, situational awareness and grit. There is much similarity between being in the wilderness and being in the fog of a situation with no available options. Anyone who has been through a divorce, endured an undiagnosed health issue, lost a job, been in a heated argument with a young adult child, been evicted or foreclosed upon knows what fog is. These are stressful situations. Lack of options creates stress. The process of finding your way in the wilderness is similar to finding your way out of these stressful circumstances. The tools required when hiking can also be used as metaphors for the tough moments of life. They are a topographical map, compass and gps.
The map shows where the resources and obstacles are.
The compass shows which way is North.
The gps shows where you are on the map.
Teenage children. If you are or have been a parent of them then just saying these words evokes some strong emotion. The teenage years are treacherous times. What would your teen years look like on a map? Imagine a very large sheet of paper the size of a map you would hang on the wall. Put a dot on one corner of the map and write your birth date. This is the beginning of your path. Around that dot you can write the names of the people available to you as a resource. These would be your parents, siblings, doctors, and care givers. You can write the names of the places like your home or daycare. If there was danger or trouble during this time write them down also. About a foot away from the dot for your birth date make another dot to indicate you being one year old. Has anything changed? Most likely you don’t remember much but write anything you are aware of. Make another dot a foot away for your second birthday. Are there playmates names to add? Any changes in the people of your family? Do the same thing for every year of your life. Make a note around each year of the strengths that you develop. Write the troubles that you encounter. If you develop a fear of something write it down. Here is a list of things and people who should be on the map of your life.
The people
Family members / friends / teachers / God / care-givers / neighbors / clergy / co-workers / police / politicians / people you work for / people your work serves / pets / dates
The places
homes / schools / medical facilities / work places / city, state, and country / parks / vacations / restaurants
Activities
hobbies / chores / obligations / music you listened to / books you read / movies you saw / the way you used your free time
You
What are your abilities or disabilities when in regards to your physical, mental, and emotional traits? Write your hopes and fears for the various points of your life as best as you can remember.
Draw a line from your birth date dot to your first-year dot and continue on connecting all of the dots. This is the path that your life has taken. This is the map of your life. The reasons you are the way you are and why you do what you do becomes clearer with details added to your map. It should make sense. Your map is different from everyone else’s but the more time you spend with someone the more your maps have in common.
Pick a time in your life which was very stressful. Look at that time on your life map. What choices are you aware of now that if you knew of then would have made the situation less stressful? Keep this in mind the next time you feel stress. There are resources available to you and there are obstacles around you. Believe that they are there. Figure out what they are. When I look back on my life, I realize that I sometimes lack faith in my resources. I want things to happen on my timeline. Waiting patiently is something I must remember. Fear is a big issue in stressful circumstances. When we are afraid of something, we behave like this -FEARS is an acronym for; Fret, Envy, Anger, wRath, and Seek to do evil. The opposite is the faith response to; trust, delight, rest, and wait patiently. Fear can be a fog of its own. When you are in the fog you have a choice between faith and fears. I am not saying that you just sit back and do nothing about not seeing options. You seek, knock and ask while having faith that your seeking will not be in vain. The key is to not fret.
Here is a simple way I can sum up this point. Stress is the result of not being aware of desirable options in a given situation. We will call the thing that keeps us from being able to see things – fog. Fog keeps us from seeing a variety of things. First it keeps us from seeing things on the map that are resources and obstacles. Next it keeps us from seeing our compass properly to know where North is. Next the fog keeps us from knowing our position.
We spent enough time on the map to understand that we are surrounded by resources and obstacles. We move on to the purpose of a compass. The arrow of a compass points to the North magnetic pole. It always points there and the magnetic pole doesn’t move too much. The North pole is symbolic of our values. This is commonly called a moral compass. North is North and right is right. It is not right to do wrong. This does not mean that knowing what is right is easy. We need something that points us toward what is right. There is a compass that tells us that the loving thing is always the right thing to do but deciding what is loving is not always easy. Choosing to love in all situations is a value. It is a true value. It is a value that blows away some of the fog. A compass points to true principles. Perhaps you are in a financial fog. You have been hit with a big expense. You know that your neighbor is doing quite well financially and they invite your over for dinner. While at their home you see piles of cash on a desk. One pile is all it would take to erase your problem. If you were to check your compass to see that it is pointing to a number of principles which would be violated by taking the pile of cash. Love is pointing in a different direction, honesty is pointing in a different direction, and among others faith is pointing in a different direction. If you were to take the money a new fog would descend upon you. This is why people’s lives become disasters. They choose to not follow the compass. There are factors which can throw our compass off and it will not point toward true principles. Lies are one of these things. They can be lies told to us by a con artist. They can be lies we tell ourselves. In the situation with the pile of cash you might tell yourself a story about how you deserve the money or about how the person who has the money doesn’t deserve it. You may believe the lie that God just want you to be happy and taking the money will make you happy. False principles skew our compass. These principles are things like greed, envy, malice, and selfishness. Irrational emotions are also in this category as well as simply not understanding the circumstance. These false principles, lack of understanding and emotions increase the amount of fog.
The next important item is our gps. This is knowing what you want, where you are and where you want to go. Rule #1 is to know what you want. This is the why I am doing it question. If you don’t know why you are going somewhere then it doesn’t make sense to go there. My belief is that if you really want to make sense of life you should know why you are here on this Earth and then make the thing that you want to be successful at living a life that does the why. In other words, you should want your why. If you want something other than your why then you are never going to accomplish the reason you are here for. Next is to know where you are going. I believe it is much more important to know where you are going than it is to know exactly where you are. Know where you are going, go there, and then you will know where you are. This leads us to create a plan to travel from where you are to where you want to go.
Here is a bonus life planning exercise
Now draw more dots on you map to indicate your next twenty years. The last years of your life are a logical result of where you were, who you were with and who you are. The same will hold true for the next years. The choices you make now and at each dot along your future path change your life. Do you have something that is hindering you now? Choosing to get a health issue fixed now can greatly improve your future. Taking care of an addiction now can greatly change your future. Learning a new skill, making time for friends, making spiritual growth a priority, making and keeping a budget are some of the things that determine our future. There are things we cannot know but there are many that are within our power to choose. The more you think through the coming years the more fog there is. The more choices you make about the people, places, and activities you write onto your future map the more the fog dissipates.
I hope you took some time to think about what you want, where you want to go and the plan you have to get there. Your plan will require some skills, tools and equipment to successfully complete the journey. Before I go on a one-week hike I put in six months of preparation. This future you is going to need to be in a certain level of physical fitness, you will need emotional health, spiritual health, you will need relationships, and your finances must be part of your consideration. You may need additional education or coaching. What you were made for, what you want, and the place you are going are worth the focus required to put together what is needed in order to reach your intended destination. Most people are not willing to say no to the distractions. My guess is that the person you desire to be in the future doesn’t spend their days doing things that amount to very little. The problem is that most people have a difficult time saying no to these time wasters. Saying yes to making what you want line up with your purpose and having a plan to get there will require saying no to a lot of stuff that is normal for people with below average lives. I don’t want to be negative about this but the stuff that fills up most people days are traps set by the evil forces of this world that are opposed to the purpose you were made for. This is something to be mad about and to use to propel you to say yes to what is good.
There has been a lot said here so to sum it up I will repeat my earlier summary and add a bit-
Stress is the result of not being aware of desirable options in a given situation. We will call the thing that keeps us from being able to see things – fog. Fog keeps us from seeing a variety of things.
- First it keeps us from seeing things on the map that are resources and obstacles.
- Second it keeps us from seeing our moral compass properly to know what is right.
- Third the fog keeps us from knowing our purpose, what we want, where we are and where we want to go.
Fog is cleared by-
- Recognizing and having faith in available resources.
- Choose to do what is right and reject influences which pull you away from making right choices.
- Being confident of your purpose in life and making fulfilling that purpose what you want.
- Choose where you want to go to get what you want and making choices consistent with the plan you have made to get you where you want to go.
If you will do the things in these last four points your life will be much better.
That’s all for now.
Peace and love fellow traveler
,Jim