Don't Embrace The Boulders

The highway of life is filled with mole hills, bumps, potholes, and occasionally boulders. Big, fat, road-blocking boulders that fill all six lanes of your highway and stop forward momentum at fatal velocities.

Potholes are someone else's choice interfering with your forward progression, like the CEO embezzling a few billion dollars and your company going bankrupt. You have no control over this, and it's definitely going to throw you off your stride for a bit.

Mole hills are little things that may look big, like losing those last three pounds or remembering to get birthday cards in the mail by Friday. At the end of your life a mole hill is a trivial thing that's easily forgotten. Bumps are also small. They rattle you, but they won't kill you.

Boulders... those are a different beast entirely. Boulders are huge things that stop you from moving. Career-ending decisions. Dead end jobs. Addictions that throw you out of the loop of life and down to the sidelines.

Boulders take many forms. Sometimes they're an addiction. Sometimes they're a lifestyle choice. Sometimes the boulder is something we have very little control over, like a cancer diagnosis or clinical depression. Sometimes the boulder is something entirely of our own making.

Whatever the case, don't embrace the boulders.

I see too many people who see a boulder on the road of life and assume it's the end of the road.

The teen mom who's life came to a screeching halt because she had a kid, and fourteen years later she's never dated, never left home, never done anything but let one choice dictate her entire life. She's embraced the boulder and refuses to move on.

Or my alcoholic uncle who has lost his family and friends to his abusive drinking, who lives on the edge of poverty because his paycheck goes straight to the liquor store, and who doesn't understand why no one is excited that he's decided to try home brewing. Alcoholism is his boulder. He's embraced it. He has decided that alcohol is more important than anything else in life, and that he can't cut back on it because being an alcoholic is what he is.

The author who throws in the towel because on publishing house rejected their novel that came over the transom. ONE. Not hundreds of rejections. Not dozens of rejections. ONE REJECTION, and the author wants to quit because Sad Author wrote the book with that publisher in mind.

It makes me want to set my hair on fire!

I get it, I really do. Some of these are very hard things to deal with. Addictions aren't something you can always handle alone. Certainly a cancer diagnosis isn't something you can shrug off. Depression sucks, I know, I've got it. But, Dude! YOU ARE NOT DEAD.

It's a boulder. It's blocking your way. But it is not the end of the road.

Don't embrace the boulder. Don't sell yourself short and let a mistake or a low point in your life define you. You are so much more than the obstacles you face. You have infinite potential to do good and help others. You have the unrivaled ability to create something wholly unique and wonderful. Don't throw that all away because of a boulder.