This week’s experiment is related to the one we just explored, and revisits something we’ve done before.  Life constantly offers us challenges and difficulties, blocks our movement forward with unexpected demands, and generally offers us opportunity after opportunity to rise to the occasion and draw on deeper reserves of strength and resilience. 

A number of years ago, I lived in an apartment that was owned by a man who was difficult and uncooperative in the extreme.  In fact, he made it onto the “worst landlord in New York City” list of a popular newspaper.  To say that living in his building was a challenge puts it mildly, as having heat and hot water, or electricity in the building, was never guaranteed.  I recall waking up one night when it was raining hard and discovered that water was pouring in through the space between the living room wall and where the windows were installed.  I also discovered water liberally flowing from the ceiling onto the floor.  This night was my introduction to what my life was going to be like in that particular apartment.

By the time I moved, gratefully, I must say, I was friends with everyone in the building – we had become a tight group, helping one another through the various challenges that came from living there.  I also had developed a resilience in the presence of difficulty that I hadn’t even realized was lacking in me when I first moved into that apartment.  That ripples from that experienced have served me since then in ways I never would have predicted, and have taught me to look more closely at challenges as powerful, real-time teachers.

For this week’s experiment, I invite you to treat whatever challenges or difficulties – or even glitches – that come your way as beneficial teachers, and to be curious about what you will learn as you move through these experiences.  Remember that whatever we fend off tends to push back at us even more strongly, so it’s useful to keep in mind what we’ve been exploring about “being water.”  Whatever comes your way, allow yourself to find the way through it that allows you to stay in the flow and to build whatever psychological “muscle” the experience requires you to develop.  One of the unexpected gifts I got from my time in the building I described was a more readily-available and robust sense of humor about myself in the presence of the often-ridiculous events life presents along the way.  Even with dramatic and heart-wrenching events, I’ve noticed that I have access to a more accessible resilience – one that developed during that time of almost-constant challenge.