I was sitting de-ticking my dog the other day and it occurred to me that these little blighters are a perfect analogy for all issues we have in our lives.
If we deal with them swiftly, the pain can be fairly short-lived and the resulting problems cut short. If we leave them to bed down and fester though, they only start to grow larger and become more of a risk to our health for the long term.
Ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away and if we try to find a short-term fix, instead of dealing with our issues head-on (did you see what I did there! ;0-) it could easily leave us with a problem that might become detrimental to our long-term health.
Problems are a fact of life. They’re everywhere and can drop on us at any time. Seeing them as an everyday hurdle instead of ‘yet another problem to deal with’ can help us prepare our immunity to their burden and allow us to store the tools nearby to reduce their impact.
These days I tend to see problems as a way to learn something about myself; to see how well I’m dealing with life as a whole. Nothing is insurmountable and our fears of their outcomes are always… always! more severe than reality. Our brain will give us a thousand different outcomes but you can guarantee it’ll be the 1001st that will be the true result.
Maybe one day I’ll discover a ‘Frontline’ for problems, but I have a feeling that, like tick ointments, it wouldn’t work for all, and we’ll still find a few little beggars nestled on our person, just itchin to be scratched!