Life’s Challenges

Today a posting by Steve Pavlina in Facebook where he stated:

The point of weight training is to get stronger, not to move hunks of metal up and down. Many of life's challenges are similar in nature.

brought to my mind an experiment I undertook in my own life to deal with challenges.

I was about to depart on an international flight from Canada to Chile which, in the past had always been a challenge.  I recalled that every time I had taken that journey, there had always been un-expected problems which seemed to turn the trip into an unpleasant experience.

What I decided to do was to expect problems and see how capable I was at getting through them.  In other words, rather than hope that everything would just go perfectly –or at least without any difficulties- I was actually looking forward to them as a challenge to my own capabilities.

Well, as it turned out there were unexpected things which would have been horrible under other circumstances, but when the first one came along (and there were several), my first reaction was to think: “Hey, this is my first problem of this trip … how am I going to handle it?”

I’m not sure if I had previously decided to expect more than one problem, but by dealing with each and then taking the attitude of “well that’s dealt with … now, what’s next” I wasn’t setting myself up to be suddenly smitten by another problem coming out of the blue when I “thought” I’d dealt with them all.

If we can establish this kind of thinking about everything in our lives, then life’s challenges will be no more onerous than adding another few pounds to the weight we’re trying to lift in a weight-training program.

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What is policing?

Today I made a stop at a Starbucks near to my residence to warm up on a cold day.

When I arrived I noticed 3 uniformed police officers at a table near the window.

I took my time, warming up and passing a few long minutes reading an interesting article on my Kindle and noticed that these officers didn’t seem in any hurry to leave and continue doing their duty.

Then I started thinking:  What do police officers do when they are policing?  In the end, I’m sure that these three officers were in this particular Starbucks well over an hour and while I wasn’t able to hear or observe anything about what they were up to, it didn’t seem to me to have much of a “policing” nature to it.

I’m not writing this to point fingers because I can’t say that these individuals were acting like typical police officers in this area, nor can I even conclude that what I saw was the way they acted on a regular basis.

All it did was get me to start thinking what it is that police officer do when they are policing and asking if what they do might be done well in a group of three sitting in a Starbucks cafe.

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Image South Australian police officer via Wikipedia