The Obstacle Course of Your Life
Ok. People voluntarily sign up for things like Tough Mudder and triathlons. They train, put time, energy, and resources into the training. They gain skill, agility, endurance, strength. It feels damn good, even when it hurts. Injuries might be talked about like war wounds, even as they’re dreaded or a hindrance to continuing to train.
What if we approached the events of life we generally consider to be obstacles as an obstacle course?
What kind of training might we do? What resources might we invest to overcome them skillfully, with agility? With anti-fragility, a trust that we’ll be stronger for it on the other end rather than just getting through it and surviving?
It feels soooo good to finish an obstacle course, and it almost creates an itch for the next one.
A little re-framing goes a long way. When my oldest child was a baby, her stretches of sleep were about 45 minutes. Which means mine were shorter. Even though I felt like a failure, I was dedicated to nighttime parenting; even though I was dedicated, I was exhausted, demoralized, and ashamed. My mental health was sinking, my attitude poor.
Then I read a book called “What Mothers Do” with the subtitle “especially when it looks like nothing” and it changed my life. The author talks about how medical students stay up late studying, do time-intensive challenging residencies, boasting about how tired they are, wearing their exhaustion as a badge of honor, right on their sleeves, a testament to how hard they were working. And that re-frame changed my whole life, really, not just my parenting.
While I didn’t boast about how tired I was, I did give myself pats on the back – “Damn, Mar, you fucking crushed it loving your girl last night.” “High five, Mar, you put in every effort, and the reason you’re tired is you didn’t stop trying.” And I actually had more energy, even though I wasn’t getting more sleep.
I had more mental space to do more research about babies’ sleep, more playfulness to try different experiments, more relaxation at night just being with her instead of trying so freakin’ hard to “get her” to go to sleep.
I don’t think my experiments “worked”; eventually she just started sleeping more, and in turn I did, too. Tackling parenting well as an obstacle course rather than the lack of sleep as an obstacle hugely impact on my entire day.
What reframes have been pivots for you?
