by Kristine Enger
As human beings, we feel confused from time to time. Some of us even spend chunks of our lives in a confused state. Perhaps there is a decision we feel we must make about a relationship, a job, or a certain path that we had hoped to take in life. A niggling feeling something is off with the status quo. We feel stuck, we want to move on, yet at the same time we cannot see through the fog, there is no clarity. We don’t know where to go or what to do.
As the frustration grows, we start questioning, when are we going to have clarity, how can we get out of this confused state that we find ourselves in?
We spend time and energy analysing the contents of our confusion, rummaging through the filing cabinets of our minds looking for answers based on past experiences. We run possible future scenarios on repeat, easily causing heaps of anxiety for ourselves. We scurry around, asking for advice from friends and relatives, looking for answers, a way out, a new direction.
There is a saying that if you don’t know what to do, do nothing. Could it be so that no action is required and we’re off the hook until the fog lifts, seemingly all by itself? Could it be so simple that we are just required to ‘sit it out’, that the answers will come, and the path will appear?
Some consider confusion to be a good thing. That ‘in between stage’, that precious time in between the old and the new, where you are creating a new normal for yourself that has not yet materialised.
Everything might still look the same in your life, the same home, relationship and job, yet it feels like you have left something behind. The shoe no longer fits. You are in the process of attaining a new level of being, seeing, understanding. A more expansive way of viewing the world and your place in it. A new perspective.
In mindfulness we learn how to fall in love with where we are right now, and that from there everything will come to us, including clarity and the solutions we are looking for.
So instead of wishing that things were different, we can learn to trust confusion, and really sink into it, and accept it. Even look forward to it, embrace it, as it inevitably leads us to something new.
Spending less time analysing the content of the confusion, we find that clarity arrives sooner. Grounded action and which steps to follow next, will inevitably become clear.
Confusion becomes an exploration of what is present.