As my fiancé and I were having a discussion this evening, I used an analogy that was really good and helps me to further explain what it means to operate in the present moment. Sometimes, God graces me with beautiful words in the midst of a conversation and it’s as though I’m preaching to myself. In these instances, I need to write them down so that I may share them with you and spread the wealth.
We were talking about a situation that occurred the other day when my daughter was flying off of the handle because she didn’t want to get dressed for school and was wreaking havoc on our house. I started becoming agitated and though I’m mostly operating in a conscious place these days, I had a moment of reactivity and in an auto-pilot moment heard myself saying, “That’s it! Your party this weekend has been cancelled.”
After I did this, she got more upset, but then did get dressed and my fiancé took her into school. After he’d dropped her off, he called me and said, “So are you really cancelling her party?” In that moment, I had already been reflecting on the morning and was in a sensitive place concerning my own reactivity. I was in a reflective state of mind and did not want to hear a lecture about how I need to not make empty threats. My mom often did this and he knows that I’ve always disagreed with that parenting approach.
I was in a state of frustration with myself over how I’d slipped and said something that I didn’t really want to do. I felt upset with myself because I’d failed to act with intention. I was annoyed that my fiancé was calling me to point it out in that moment when I hadn’t fully made peace with myself yet.
In our conversation this evening, I was talking about this with him and told him how I was getting a lot better with not beating myself up over things these days, but in that moment the other day I was in a mini session of doing this very thing while digesting how things went down that morning. I explained to him that while I did this for a second, I was much better about moving on quicker.
I then said, “It’s good to reflect on situations for a moment after they happen. It’s like mining for diamonds or precious stones with the mining pan. The situation is the sand that you pick up in the pan. You have to look into the situation for the diamonds and nuggets of precious wisdom so that you can learn from the experience after it happens, but then you need to sift the sand through the pan and walk away from it. The sand (situation) falls away and you move on with the wisdom. Once that is done, you need to “let it go.” There is nothing more to be gained from carrying around the sand. You’ve already taken what was needed and can comfortably move on.
What I used to do, using this same analogy is take all the sand (situation) and bury myself with it until I could barely breathe. I would replay the frustration over and over again in my mind resulting in higher levels of frustration, stress, irritation, annoyance, anger, and defeat. If we fail to mine for the wisdom in a situation we walk away less rich for having had the experience. If we pick up the sand and bury ourselves in it, we can’t move forward very easily and again we don’t gain the diamonds because they are lost within the big pan of sand that we’ve decided to hang on to. We need to find what’s necessary, then sift out what is not and let it fall away. I urge you to start thinking about how you treat your frustrations. Are you still carrying around all of the sand from a situation rather than sifting through it for the diamonds and letting the sand return back to the Earth? In other words, are you mining the past for useful lessons and then letting them lay back to rest where they belong (in the past)? I urge you to consider sifting through the past and releasing all of the extra “sand” you are carrying around. It only saps the energy you could be putting into this moment. You aren’t useful to anyone if you are buried in sand
What is your current state? Are you feeling buried or are you feeling wiser for the setbacks and experiences you’ve been gifted? Please reach out if you’d like help with gaining perspective. We can start the excavation process together.