This is a picture of my handless clock in my office. We don’t want to wait until all of our emotional stress or problems are resolved or gone before we truly start to live our lives. As we know, there will never be a perfect situation where we can “finally” start to live our lives in a direction we care about. It will always be something. We can start now. We want to take the demons and stress with us, and live a life we care about in spite of these negative experiences. We can’t wish it away or perform enough rituals to make it just disappear. It’s not that we want the demons and stress to hang out with us, they just beat us down. Let them be there though, fight them by not fighting them, and they can fade into the background where they belong. If we continue to avoid them or try fix everything or make it just right, we are often very disappointed that these things just get bigger the more we try to rid ourselves of our struggles. We see this over and over in OCD, with the endless and senseless rituals. Some things can be resolved, some can’t. Lets do what we can with what we have, demons and all, and lean into a life that we care about.
Jeremy Rudd