This Side of the Bridge
What is worry? It is concentrated energy. Focused thinking. Repetitive cogitation. Deep reflection. Careful meditation. All of which sound like a good thing, right? Except with worry there is a negative loop. One that focuses on and anticipates only potential threats.
Even that sounds smart. Aren’t we as leaders trying to predict the future, anticipating needs before they are even here? That requires a sort of fascination with threats. And when we expand the realm of possibility to ALL potential threats, we are really in a noose.
The list is never ending. The more creative we are, the longer our “potential” lists become. And even good things and healthy tensions get put into the broad category of potential threat. That can be incredibly paralyzing. We either turn there to hope OR to anxiety and fear.
When we start to see only the potential threats, we forget about the potential joys and learnings. And quickly we get lost. We simply swim from one deep sea of threats to another. Life starts to be more about avoiding risks than seeing past them.
We lose sight. We lose vision. We are truncated. Unable to see what is across the bridge. We can only see the hundreds (and on bad days thousands) of risks in crossing. Only when we renew our sight on what is across, on the goal, do we find ourselves able to cross.
And we must remove the huge mental barrier that somehow time is against us. That time is a merciless task-master punishing us, holding a list of all the things we didn’t do - this side of the bridge thinking. Time is irrelevant on the bridge. There’s a whole new world coming.
And in that new world is everything we need. Mostly love. A limitless supply of love. For without love everything we do or aspire to do feels cheap, almost transactional. But with love we focus on vision. With love, we remember what is important. With love, we can.
But you have to cross the bridge to get there. You have to believe it to see it. You have to trust to experience it. Will you? Will you trust that life is for you, not against you? Will you trust that the bridge is really around the corner? It is.
The bridge you have been waiting for is just up ahead. It may seem like you can’t make it, but you can. Can you trust the Guide to get you there? It may seem like you can’t, like His words are misplaced. Or unfounded. Or even deceptive. Trust.
It is there. Everything you need is there. Keep walking. Enjoy it. Look around. Take in the nature. Take in the beauty. But keep walking. The bridge is up ahead. Just around the corner.
