Blessed Are The Stuck
Whether exacerbated by Covid, or due to the times and seasons of the people in my life, there seems to be a lot of it about. I’m talking about feeling stuck; a kind of paralysis in one’s life. It seems to be spreading like the pandemic.
Friends have shared honestly with words like…
“I’ve never felt so lost and stuck in my life, I can’t see the way through all this”.
I’ve experienced my fair share of stuck-ness and it’s one of the most uncomfortable, life-strangling feelings I know. Like getting stuck in quick drying, knee high mud, there is no way forward and no way back. All you can do is try to stop yourself from spiralling into panic.
The pressures of life on our relationships, careers, parenting and our well-made plans, all have the capacity to force us into cul-de-sacs of despair, when things don’t work out and push our anxiety levels through the roof. What do we do when that happens?
Right now, I’m working on 2 giant art canvases’ both 150cm x 150cm (5’ x 5’). This experience for me is akin to learning to walk on a high wire. I oscillate my painting time between the two. It’s like caring for a couple of demanding children who know what they want, but aren’t able to tell you. I have to keep asking them, “So, is that what you had in mind?”,and then I stand back and wait. And often I hear the reply, “Nooooo!!” So, I step back in to correct and adjust. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t and then more tea is needed and some long reflection time is required. Then, when we all feel happy, we move on.
And there are also those times when I get completely stuck and I want to yell at the piece, “You’re just not helping me…I’m utterly lost…in fact things have regresses and I just can’t see any way out”. Tea doesn’t help at these points. Screaming doesn’t help either. It’s more like time to go on a long walk and break attachment from my creation.
On such a walk today, I came up with some thoughts around this issue of stuck-ness. Is this state a curse to be avoided, or might it actually be a blessing?
When I feel stuck it means that my wise inner voice is trying to get my attention - it’s an alarm sounding, to tell me something needs to change. It is the message itself I need to be listening to, not my discomfort. What am I needing to hear?
Being stuck means I’m heading in the wrong direction – in my relationships, in my work place, in my mental state or in my creative endeavours. Without intentional change the story will stay the same and the stuck-ness will become a life style.
The truth is that I can trust myself to work out how to get un-stuck. We all have the potential and the skills to find answers, however hard that might be.
If you’re stuck in solid mud, up to the rim of your wellington boots and the muddy-goo around you is hardening like concreate, you might say, “There is no hope, I’m stuck like this forever”, or you might decide that you’re definitely not staying put. So, you slip your feet out of their place of imprisonment, leave your wellies behind and stride precariously to higher ground. It will be messy, but only for a while.
We all get stuck, it’s part of being human. Sometimes the issues feel massive and insurmountable and the pain acute. Then we need each other to speak truth to stuck-ness, because despair can hold us hostage and stop us from seeing the changes that are possible.
I’m going upstairs now to tell my paintings that they will get finished and we will make it to the other side, no matter how long it takes and however many muddy socks we’ll have to wash along the way.