The Awareness Initiative Blog

Today I was again reminded that situations often look worse than they are, and all that needs to be done is take one step at a time.

I am a Sudoku player. If you’re not familiar, it’s a number game, similar in look to a crossword puzzle. I began it because I read that doing these types of games or puzzles help to keep your brain in tact. I’m not sure it’s working. If it is, it’s scarey to think of what I’d forget if I wasn’t playing the game. But meanwhile, I have become a bit of a Sudoku addict.

I now have several books going. One’s by the bed, a couple are in the bathroom . . . Some of the puzzles are extremely difficult and others are very easy. I fluctuate between them, doing the easy ones when I’m . . . Well, feeling lazy.

Today I was working on an “extreme” puzzle. There were no easy solutions. I had to pencil several numeric possibilities into each square and hated that. It looked like there were too many possibilities and the puzzle would take me forever to solve. I began to come up with several excuses for not doing the puzzle: “It’s not fun anymore. I don’t have to do this. I want to play at an easy one.” Or, ” It may be unsolvable – one of the rare puzzles that got put into the book by mistake.” I wanted to take the easy way out and move on. But, I’m relentless in some ways (OK, most ways) and I plodded on putting numbers in squares.

A couple minutes into it and I found one. A number became obvious which helped me to eliminate others, fill in others and move on. What looked like a puzzle that would take me forever or was even unsolvable was then finished in 10 minutes. What fun it was to finish such a difficult looking task so easily. How surprising that what seemed an daunting task was just minutes from being complete.

I laughed at my reluctance to continue on when things got rough or seemed too much. How often does this happen in life? I have what seems like “too much work” on my desk and stress out because I think it will take forever to get done. Or worse, I’m afraid I’ll fail. Sometimes problems seem overwhelming and unsolvable. But, they aren’t.

Negative anticipation is overrated. When we stress over the challenges in front of us we throw our energy away on illusion. The key is to just take one small step – fill in one square at a time – and the answers begin to appear. The solution unravels in front of us. It’s impossible to see how a situation will be handled in the future because we aren’t there yet. As we act, the future unfolds, we learn, we deal with it.