I’ve always openly shared my struggles with anxiety and I’ve recently found a tool that works for me.  It’s a deceptively simple game where you have to identify the pattern of eliminating the shape to clear the board.  For my chaotic brain, it’s incredibly soothing.  The board itself is pure chaos and it’s so satisfying to bring it back to order.  Yet, like with most things, that simplicity made me realize something greater.  It literally only takes ONE arrow freed to unlock the rest.  Seriously, the board can look like one big tangle with no clear start/end but you find the one piece and they all come undone.  There’s a life lesson there.  We spend so much time looking and searching for answers, trying different things, trying to force different things because we are so set on an outcome that we try to do all the things.  We try to do everything everywhere all at once so to speak.  All we need is that one thing.  The ONE change, the one phone call, the one leap, the one video, the one email, the one dinner, the one shift in perspective to unlock the entire secret/key to our lives.

It made me see that we get anxious BECAUSE we are so set on finding that answer and we feel we are under some sort of time clock that if we don’t figure it out RIGHT NOW we are somehow behind or that we’ve done something wrong.  Some solutions are easy but many of them take time.  We won’t know it works until it works and sometimes the door opens immediately and others it stays closed.  There are even the times the door opens but there’s another door just inside.  We all have a path and there is something to be said for the fact that whatever is meant to cross our path will, if it was meant to happen it will happen.  But there is also something to be said for clarity, patience, and persistence.  Knowing when to keep going, knowing when to rest, knowing when movement is just wasted energy is key.  That key alone can open doors as well.  But I want to encourage everyone to remember that just because things look or feel overly complicated, there is always that one thing that can resolve it.  Don’t give up.  Sit in the overwhelm for a minute, breathe, and look around.  The answer will come, sometimes when we least expect it—and the world opens from there.