Member-only story
When Life Asks You a Question, How Do You Respond?
You rarely have to act immediately
Author Tom Bodett once said: “In school, you’re taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you’re given a test that teaches you a lesson.”
Not only do life’s tests come without instructions, studying materials, or time to prepare, they’re also rarely as straightforward as “jump that hurdle,” “solve this equation,” or “fill in the blank.” Life is messy. It’s all blanks, equations break all the time, and hurdles appear out of thin air left, right, and center.
If your life feels like a multiple-choice exam more so than a series of complex, uncertain decisions, chances are, someone else is running it. Someone else designed the test. Who picked the blanks for you? Actually, life is an essay, Seth Godin says. A continuous story, and you get to write a little of it, every single day.
Stephen King doesn’t know where his novels go when he starts them. He just goes. Do obstacles come up? Of course. But — and this is the beauty of life’s non-linearity — you can approach them from many different angles. Some you can avoid, others jump over, the occasional obstacle you can even flip and turn into a stepping stone, a springboard that’ll propel you to new heights. There’s no single answer at the end of the textbook, many different…
