Whenever one of my children is going through a time of stress and overwhelm, I remind them how to get through it… think of a really big wave. The kind that rises up in front of you and, for just a moment, makes you wonder if you can handle what is coming.
I knew my children would remember how that feels, playing in the ocean and all of a sudden a much bigger wave is coming towards you… you get an immediate pit in your stomach and only a few seconds to figure out what to do as it keeps rushing towards you — and you know you can’t stop it and you don’t have time to swim back to shore before it hits. It’s quite scary.
If you try to stay on top of a wave like that—treading water as hard as you can, fighting to keep your head above it, resisting its power—it will curl over you.
Tumble you to the bottom. Drag you along the ocean floor. And sometimes pull you even farther out than where you started.
So the trick is… you run right toward it.
And dive.
You dive straight through the middle of the very thing that looked so enormous. And then something amazing happens. The wave passes over you. You feel all of that incredible energy moving above and around you, but you are cutting through it.
And seconds later, you emerge on the other side. You turn around and look back at the wave that seemed so overwhelming just moments before. And watch it roll past and recede away from you.
I think about life’s hurdles that way and it always helps me when I don’t know what to do and I am powerless and I feel frozen in fear — I remind myself the only way to get past a big wave is run towards it and to dive straight into it.
We are so often told, “Jump, and the net will appear…” but I’ve never found that particularly comforting. Jumping sounds scary to me. And there have been plenty of times in my life when I jumped and, quite frankly, no net appeared.
So I don’t tell myself to jump.
I tell myself to dive.
Dive straight into the middle of it. Dive into the uncertainty of it. Dive into the thing I wish I didn’t have to deal with at all. Dive when I don’t know how everything (or let’s face it, how anything) is going to turn out. Because I don’t need a net to appear. I just need to run towards it and dive straight through the wave.
Remembering how that feels gives me courage as I force myself to run towards what I wish I could run away from.
That is why I painted this painting. Maybe I painted it for you too? For more information on this piece, hop over here. This artwork is perfect for someone facing, or in the middle of, a huge life transition or upheaval.
If you could use a visual reminder that when a big wave comes over you, and as you are standing there looking up at it looming over your head, you have to decide: you are either going to stand there looking up as a huge wall of water swallows you whole… or you are going to dive into it.
Dive!
xoxox,
Laura Koniver MD