Solutions Are Not Always Obvious

I don’t want to make a unilateral statement, but in my life, solutions are not always obvious. I recently read a parable many of you probably read a long while back called, “The Prisoner in the Dark Cave.”

A man sentenced to death is placed in a dark cave. He’s told there is a way out and if he finds it, he’s free. The only light source is a hole above him where food and water are lowered to him for thirty days. After the thirty days, that would cease.

The man saw the hole where the light came in as his only way out, because it was obvious. For days, he stacked every rock he could find, believing once he got the pile high enough, he could climb up and lift himself out. The ending is that this tactic didn’t work and he died. He’d focused so much on the “obvious,” he never explored where he was. Granted, it was dark in the cave, but had he felt along the wall, he would have found a tunnel that led to freedom. The obvious way led to his death. None of us are comfortable when we feel we’re in a state of indecision or standing in darkness. We want to take an action and we want it to be a right action.

Another line I read in the same book is, “Life is not a problem to be solved; it is a mystery to be lived. Many of us were conditioned to focus a good deal of energy on problems or see situations as problems that need to be solved. What would life feel and be like if we did consider it a mystery to be lived instead?

There are times when either choices we make or life just being itself result in our feeling discomfort. We don’t like to feel uncomfortable. Some situations do require immediate action; some benefit more and provide the outcome we truly wish if we don’t rush to change things. An example: You need or want to find a job. There’s a temptation, depending on your situation, to take the first one offered to you...just to get some relief! Have you ever known anyone who did that then discovered, say, a week later that the ideal job for them was available? Or accepted the job and stayed there the rest of their working lives and were miserable?

If you ever find yourself in a situation that feels like the man’s cave, remind yourself that sometimes, it’s necessary to use all of our skills and abilities, and a bit of a sense of wonder and mystery, to discover a way out that’s far better for us than perhaps the “obvious” is.