Ever been on a roll, everything falling into place and then one thing goes to pot? Something unexpected fails, goes wrong, falls in a heap or just goes up Shit’s Creek without prior notice? It can be hard to keep the momentum of success going under these circumstances. Resilience goes a long way to keeping on keeping on, but so does a healthy mindset of toughness and systems approaches.
I’ve just had this happen. Lots of things are falling into place and shortly I’ve got a bit of a 4WD trip laid on. The LandCruiser has new tyres, is running well, ute’s being sold so I’ll have some finances – all looking the business. Except it appears the alternator in the cruiser has decided to call it a day and fail. Car won’t go without power. It’s easy to see how something like this can cause all that good forward movement to stall – now I have to stop, get that fixed (hopefully ASAP) and then try to recover the momentum. Or I can try something else…
I’ve been thinking of getting the car into an auto electrician for awhile to check over some charging issues with my auxiliary battery. Not needed for this next little trip, but will be for a bigger one later in the year. Now I have impetus to bring that forward – booking the truck in to have the alternator fixed AND check the aux battery charging. I’ve pulled that negative across and jammed it into the bigger plan. My momentum has been maintained and even pushed ahead a little bit! Yeeha! Now I can kill two birds with one stone.
I tend to view life as a big system made up of lots of little systems. You’ve probably gathered that from these posts and it’s obvious in the way that I work. It comes from being in IT where changes in one area will often affect n+1 more areas. Considering things from a macro view (with strong micro elements) makes life easier and I’ve gotten into the habit of that for most things. For example – the household is made up of many systems. At the top level is the family, and then finances which branches off to basic living systems – assets, food, water, vehicles and so on. Working on one area can be just confined to that system OR it can be extrapolated to improve others. When something goes wrong, then it can affect multiple systems – and this is the time to find the greatest improvements. I have found this to be a boost to the momentum of daily life – it’s really satisfying to finish or fix something that has long been broken or working in a non-optimal manner.
Perspective is the key to building this skill – looking at things from a top down manner even while living the life. I have used meditation to help with this and putting things in perspective can be a very useful tool. Back checking with those you trust ensures that this perspective doesn’t get skewed in a dodgy direction. Sometimes it’s a matter of being patient and seeing things through for a while before jumping to a decision or action. I find this to be most challenging – I’m impatient for things to get better and hate to wait. It’s been a growth point for me to find a modicum of space to be patient in. So I’ve managed, in this instance, to turn a negative into a nice little positive. Let’s see how expensive it turns out to be!
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