I confess I’ve never actually tried this and I don’t recommend you do either. So for the sake of this article, let’s just take it on its face value. The story goes that if you put a frog in boiling water, she’ll jump right out of the pot. But if you put her in cold water and slowly bring the water to a boil, she won’t. The change is so gradual that she doesn’t notice until it’s too late. Not a very good ending for frog #2.
For the most part we don’t have many real life boiling water situations, i.e. attack by a saber toothed tiger. Our minds may register way too many situations as attacks by saber toothed tigers and kick us into fight or flight so often that it fries our neuro circuitry but that’s a topic for another day.
The good news is you don’t have to deal with too many attacking tigers.
The bad news is that you do have to deal with a lot of gradually getting hotter, very close to boiling water. Those heating up waters don’t cause immediate physical death but they do cause lots of little deaths sort of like gradual erosions of another kind.
Erosion and little death of:
• your zest;
• your curiousity;
• your vim and vigor;
• your joie de vivre;
• your energy;
• your happiness.
It may happen so gradually you don’t even notice it until one day you find yourself wondering things like…
What happened?
Is this all there is to life?
I just feel like I’m a rat in a maze running from one to do to another.
What’s the point of all of this?
Have you ever had the experience of leaving town and being in a setting that’s so quiet that it’s only once you hit the quiet that you realize how loud the city was. The truth is that we’re bombarded on so many levels with uninvited stimuli. We’re attached to our cell phones and our computers and they ping and ding and tell us we’re needed here and there… and of course, we’re needed NOW. And we get alerts whenever another awful thing happens. Morning news. Afternoon news. Breaking news. Tweets. Facebook alerts. Emails. I heard yesterday that the average person in the US gets an average 100 emails a day to sort through.
And in the middle of all this incessant background/foreground drone we have work and to do lists and bosses and colleagues and neighbors and parents and kids and health issues and world affairs to deal with.
It’s no wonder we’re reaching for glass after glass of wine every evening and binge watching Netflix and Amazon Prime.
We are fried–to the core.
A lot of us are sitting in the middle of pots that are getting hotter and hotter. And it’s the norm. We look around and think…
“Well, maybe I don’t have it so bad. I just need to get better at all of this. I should be able to do more. I’ll just push harder.”
And so the water just gets hotter… and hotter… and hotter.
You can’t thrive in hot water. Not even close. In fact in hot water, all kinds of gunky things start to happen like anxiety and the blues and relationship issues and apathy and lethargy and physical aches and pains of all kinds.
Maybe it’s time to check the temperature of your water. Is your pot close to boiling over?
I checked mine not too long ago on a vacation where I unplugged from technology. I was shocked! The thing of it is, I do check in, and on a pretty regular basis at that. I meditate every day. I garden. I kayak. I do yoga. And still….
The water had been heating up pretty steadily without my even realizing it. When it inches up in infinitesimal increments it’s hard to notice. In fact it’s pretty impossible to notice unless we’re actively and consciously checking in on it.
What I realized is that we’re in a stretch on our planet right now where it truly takes some herculean will power and boundary setting to make the space and time we need to check back in with ourselves and check the temperature of our water.
Most of all it takes conscious and regular intention. Awareness is always the first step. What’s your favorite way to make space for yourself–that kind of space that would really let you take the temperature of the water that is your life? Leave me a comment and let me know. I’d love to hear from you.
