Question: what do you do when someone places what seems like an insurmountable obstacle in front of you? Do you try to climb over it? Squeeze round the side of it? Or just give up and back off? Or do you play with the metaphor to see if there is a solution your conscious mind hasn’t yet come up with?
OK. Let’s play. What kind of obstacle is that obstacle? It is a great big boulder that has been dropped on to the road in front of me. The road is now impassable. There’s no way I can move this boulder on my own, and even if I got help it would be hard to shift.
It’s like an Act of God: no one could have done anything about this boulder appearing on the road. It’s a leap of faith to even accept that this boulder has completely changed my reality, so I spend some time looking in the opposite direction.
Now I’m facing the boulder. The dust is still rising. I’m going in to have a closer look. It’s made of granite, and sparkles with quartz crystals. There is something comfortingly solid about it; a sense that it has been forged over hundreds of thousands of years – enduring, almost eternal.
It reminds me of some of the standing stones I’ve visited – it feels so ancient and almost spiritual. Yet it chose to break away from whatever it was attached to and tumble down the hillside on to my path.
So this boulder isn’t as threatening as I had imagined. Perhaps it is trying to show me that the path I had been taking is not the one I should be following.
But is this the right conclusion? I allow my intuition to guide me to a Zen proverb: “The obstacle is the path”. Obstacles that were huge and insurmountable today will, with time and thought, become not so big tomorrow.
There’s also a Zen story attached to this proverb, about a king who believed his people had lost their inspiration. He decided to place a boulder on the only road into his city. Most people, when confronted by the obstacle, turned back. Then an old man arrived, and was excited by the challenge posed by the boulder.
A quote from ancient mathematician Archimedes popped into his head: “If you give me a large enough lever and a fulcrum on which to place it, I shall move the world.” So the old man found a long wooden pole and placed it under the boulder. He levered away until the boulder was completely off the road.
The old man was about to set off toward the city, but noticed a bag lying where the boulder once stood. He looked inside and found a large amount of gold as well as a note. The note read: “This gold is for you, since you know that great obstacles can lead to bigger opportunities.”
The thought that there might be gold under the boulder is a great comfort to me. I’m going to revisit the scene and spend time near the boulder until inspiration strikes. Then I might find a way to move mountains.
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