Stirring Up Trouble-Soup
So you've got yourself elbow-deep-in-some-sort-of-poop-soup and you're wondering how you got here, why you got here and how much it stinks to be here.
Yep...we've all been there at one-time or many in our lives, haven't we?
Maybe you've gone and stirred-up some trouble in your relationship.
Maybe you've gone and stirred-up some trouble in your finances.
Or maybe you've gone and stirred-up some trouble with your health, career, your kids, or your next door neighbor.
It doesn't matter what kind of trouble you've mixed up and it matters less how or why you made it.
If you were making a soup - you'd add some sort of broth (you know, the gluten-free/soy-free/dairy-free/toxin-free kind), veggies, spices, meat, more gluten-dairy-soy-free stuff and maybe a little bit of salt (of the sea variety, of course) - and voila - you'd have soup. Maybe you'd give a taste-test along the way, or maybe you'd let it simmer awhile before finding out what all of those ingredients produced.
Let's say in this example that you didn't like the soup you made (because we're talking "trouble" here and most of you don't like the troubles you create). You'd have multiple choices about what to do about this soup. You could keep eating it and while it wasn't your favorite, you'd be happy that you had something to warm your tummy; you could keep eating it and complain about the crappy soup you just made; you could stop eating it and throw it out - end of soup; you could stop eating it and endlessly tell people about the crappy soup you made; you could eat it or not eat it - make how it turned out be irrelevant to you, and choose how to respond to your recent experience of this soup - knowing that it's made you ever-so-much-clearer about what you'd rather put in your soup and what would make it better next time. Hence, "trouble soup" would inspire you to create something different.
Worthy noting here - if you wanted to make a different soup, you wouldn't spend much time looking at the ingredients you did put in, how they got in the soup, why they got in the soup, or even when they got in the soup.
The answer to all of those questions is, "You put the ingredients in the soup and that's the soup you got. Period."
Also worth noting - you wouldn't spend significant time or attention trying to avoid the ingredients you didn't want in your soup any more than you'd tell a waiter what you don't want to eat when you sit down to order from the menu. You would instead, think about what ingredients you do want in your soup just like you would tell the waiter what you do want to eat when you order something to eat. Simple.
Now take the "trouble" you've gotten yourself into and think of it as soup. You've added ingredients along the way - which are your thoughts, feelings and subsequent actions - which in-turn have rendered you results (your soup). Yes, your soup is made up of what you think, how you feel, and the things you do. If you put chicken in your soup, you end up with some-sort-of soup with chicken mixed-in-with a wholelotof other ingredients. How could it be any different from that?
When you eat soup and it's not necessarily what you want, like or would-have-ever-wished-for, you have choices (as noted above). You pretty-much don't freak-out over the soup that you don't like.
When you make some trouble-soup for yourself (something you don't want/don't like), you can tend to lean on the side of freaking-out. Why?
Are you an awful-wretch because you made a crappy soup?
Are you unworthy because your soup isn't at-all how you wanted it to be?
Are you a failure because your soup didn't turn out so well?
Are you a not-good-enough-soup-maker because you didn't pay attention to what you were putting in your soup, or because someone else's soup is turning out better than yours?
Are you afraid now of making another soup-full-of-trouble because you don't like trouble soup?
Give yourself a break.
Was it such a big deal to have soup you didn't like?
It's just a bunch of ingredients that you've thrown-in together. Maybe you weren't paying attention to the ingredients you were adding along-the-way, but now you know that you want to (and can) pay more attention to what you're putting into your soup.
You have greater clarity about what kind of soup you want to make next time and you're clearer than ever that the ingredients you put into your soup matter.
Get in there and make your soup - you're not here to make the perfect soup. Part of the process of making soup is the discovery along the way of what ingredients you like best.
You can always make different soup.