“…where they never have troubles! At least very few.”
“Then NEW troubles came! From above! And below! A Skritz at my neck! And a Skrink at my toe! And now I was really in trouble you know. The rocks! And the quail! And the Skrintz And the Skrink! I had so many troubles, I just couldn’t think!”
Have you had days or weeks like that? I do and I did last week. I was feeling so run down, worn out, overwhelmed and it just didn’t seem to stop….in the middle of it all, I came to the realization I had had some serious responsibility for the turmoil I was in.
Last week, my little monkey requested that we read “I Had Trouble in getting to Solla Sollew” as his bed time story. Don’t you just love Dr Seuss books? There is something about the rhyming and the rhythm…it brings up memories of my dad reading Dr. Suess to my brother and I. We would always laugh when my dad got tongue tied.
Now that I am older, I realize the lessons which are embedded into these stories of fancy and imaginative worlds. I am sure at some point the morals to the story sunk in when I was a child but somehow these lessons seem more important now. Or perhaps they just seem to jump out at me more especially at times when I seem to need them most.
The character in this Dr Suess story has been bombarded with troubles and can’t seem to find a way to escape them. He is told of a place – Solla Sollew – “where they never have troubles! At least very few” Along the way, he finds many more troubles that are worse even worse than the ones he is trying to be leave behind. Well, DUH! We all know that you can’t run away from your problems, don’t we? I do, I know that but last week, I was not acting like I knew this.
The more I tried to avoid my worries, the worse they got. The more I tried to fix them on my own with out asking for help, the more overwhelmed I became. The more I hid inside myself instead of expressing my feelings, the lonelier I felt. I kept trying to get to a place where it just all went away. But I never got there and the truth is I never will.
Life will always hold challenges, struggles, obstacles, troubles….it just will. And perhaps it is not trying to find away around these but it is in the effort to overcome them that I can find the rewards – joy, love, strength, happiness…-that life will always hold too.
