Starting over… A good start to a new life

Chapter 13 – FAIO? CHACUAIA, GET THE TRAIN!

What if we could rewrite the Myth of Sisyphus? Eventually Zeus managed to capture him, Sisyphus, and, having deceived and aroused the wrath of the gods, he was condemned to spend eternity pushing a boulder to the top of a mountain. However, whenever the stone was about to reach its goal, it would roll down the mountain and Sisyphus had to get the job done all over again. And so for all centuries, until the end of time...

Our life sometimes resembles this immense suffering, that of Sisyphus, that is, having to face the “almost” syndrome or:

I almost got there;
almost gave;
I was almost happy;
almost won...

And almost every now and then we are halfway there, often being crushed by the immense rock that descends from the mountain and we see it later, dusty but still whole, right there at the beginning of the path, when we pushed it and believed we would take it to the summit and there we would leave it, as on an altar where our victory would be revered. Halfway there, resigned after the pain of frustration, we go back to the beginning, to resume the push-push fight, uphill, and face a painful fact: the rock gets bigger and heavier with each failed attempt and that's desperate.

A fresh start is all the more painful because of a misconception: the rock doesn't get heavier and bigger! Our strength is that they are gone with each attempt and we are lacking in the next one, and everything becomes much more difficult! And as the difficulty increases, so does our desire to give up, abandon and leave it in the hands of the gods who govern the future, especially those who manage the Department of Chance.

I learned two good lessons in this regard. The first, still at the age of 14, in a group of scouts: the instructor asked our little troop, half a dozen skinny ones, to move a rock near a trail where we were doing the instructional march. It was huge and always unmoved by our efforts to move it to the point determined by the instructor. When we had already become a rag from so much fatigue and sweat, behold, the instructor drops the bomb: "Why don't you break the rock and take the pieces, one at a time, to the determined point?" Surprised, that's what we did, using our standard tools and, after much thrashing, the rock gave way, breaking into pieces, which were carried by the triumphant troop to a location meters ahead.

Starting over… A good start to a new life – Chapter 13 — Photo: Pixabay

The second occurred on the occasion of compulsory military service. The platoon to which it belonged was supposed to lift a 105 mm howitzer tube, an artillery piece on wheels and pulled by jeeps and other vehicles. After a lot of effort, we were barely able to lift the pipe (commonly called a pipe…), when the instructor sergeant said to us: “Why don't you take the hydraulic jacks from the trucks and use them to lift the pipe?” And that's what we did and, to our delight, we were able to lift that immense weight and put it on a kind of cart to move it to where it should be placed for inspection and maintenance.

In both cases I learned that:

if it's too big and heavy, break it up into smaller pieces, and it's only a matter of time before we get bigger and bigger;
if lifting a certain weight or shape is difficult, try looking for leverage support of any kind.

That's right… A real restart may require special measures in terms of assistance, at least for the initial measures. It is not possible to carry out 100% of the actions that configure a real and consistent restart, the best thing is to execute what is closest, perhaps dividing the whole into parts, as proposed by the Cartesian method, by René Descartes (1596-1650) . Each part worked on and finished is a good option for totality to be achieved. You can't push the rock all at once to the top, try millimeter by millimeter, which is to say: it's not possible to start over what needs to be done in an integral way, do it as possible in the strategy of "little bit by bit shape a piece!” A speaker once asked a question to a very “locked in”, ultra-conservative, instruction manual-headed audience: “How do you eat a whole elephant?” After minutes of confused and restless debates, with no response other than the one that claimed to be impossible, the speaker said in a loud and clear voice: “One little piece at a time, come on!” When the people present understood the extent of wisdom in the unassuming question, a beautiful round of applause rose in the environment and many smiles appeared on faces previously creased by uncertainty and discomfort.

A little ritual to help fix what was said about problems and their weight and size. Get a large stone and on it write the name of your fresh start project and, in smaller letters, a word for each obstacle or force opposing your fresh start project. After that and following a prayer in favor of your guardian angel, apply a sledgehammer to the stone and then see the pieces in which it fragmented, put them together and imagine that this was how it was and now is your project for a fresh start: before a huge problem and now a bunch of problems of different sizes, which you decide are much smaller than your fighting capacity and stubbornness to solve them and go for it!

A leverage at the beginning of your fresh start project is always a good idea! Don't turn your back on an opportunity for leverage, however small and without promising explosions of results and release of the most intense energies. See what can help give movement to the restart project, just as a hydraulic jack can lift the barrel of the cannon only 1 millimeter, but enough to gather more energy for the next millimeter. Count on the strength of the first step, because there will not be a series of other steps if the first one is not carried out, and look for opportunities for leverage, such as:

study and research what other people have done in the same situation you find yourself in;
seek advice from people you trust;
seek support where possible, as if it were a “little hand” to give a “shake” to the problem itself;
start where you can, even if they are steps ahead of what is configured as a real initial step.

Let's go to a ritual full of symbolism and that can turn out to be an interesting leverage of what is intended to recompose as a fresh start: build a tower with dominoes, preferably plastic, with two on each "floor", arranged in a symmetrically parallel way. Take at least two crates from the game for this, because one just won't be enough. Make the rook, taking it one piece at a time, of course without demolishing the rook, using only the thumb and forefinger of your dominant hand. Place the removed piece on a new floor, at the top of the tower, counting how many pieces are removed and thus rearranged, and go until it is no longer possible to remove any pieces. Reassemble the tower and follow the same withdrawal method, but with your non-dominant hand and then compare the number of pieces moved in each phase and see that… with the dominant hand the productivity is MUCH higher, and take this with a symbolism of that everything can be done, in the possible order, at the right time, starting where it can start, with the appropriate speed.

There is no mountain, much less rock, to justify your fears! Climb the slopes of one and break the other, but go for it!

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