Friday, 20 September 2013

A lesson from a water bottle

Yesterday morning I was trying to put the top on the new drink bottle I got for my daughter and no matter how hard I tried I just could not get it to fit back together.  And despite knowing what I was doing was incorrect; I kept repeating the same thing over and over again. I kept trying to screw the top on knowing there was no grip. No traction for the top to seal to the bottom.
I looked at the top. Looked at the bottom. Confused by how the top could come off the bottom but yet would not fit back together. I grew frustrated so I gave up. Frustrated because even though I knew the way I was trying to fit the top on the bottom was incorrect I convinced myself my daughter had broken the water bottle when she had taken it apart. Shifting the blame from me to her. Trying to find a reason for my lack of ability outside myself. She had to have broken it if I could not fit it back together.
So what did I do when I woke my daughter up? Of course, I accused her of breaking the brand new water bottle because she was the one who had taken it apart. She looked at me and told me all she had done was unscrew the iced compartment that was in the top and had put it in the freezer as the instructions had told her to do.
Without panicking she went to the fridge and got the bottom out. Then went to the freezer and got out the iced compartment. She tried to screw the iced compartment into the top as I had done over and over again. To no avail.  And at first I was quite relived that she too could not get the bottle fixed because it proved that she had broken it. Justifying my frustration.
She then plopped the iced compartment  into the water bottle. I was just about to yell at her thinking we would waste all the water we had put in the bottle because I thought we would have to fish the ice compartment out of the bottle. But before I could say anything, the iced compartment magically and perfectly filled the mouth of the water bottle. Then she triumphantly put the top on without any bother. My mouth dropped open. I felt so silly for accusing her of something she had not done.
She looked at me and I at her. Her eyes gleaming. Proud of what she had accomplished. And I thanked her for helping me to see something that was so clear before my eyes. Sometimes we are so blinded by what we believe that we don’t see what is truly in front of our faces. Sometimes our minds are made up about what the problem is that we can’t see the solution that is being offered to us.  Sometimes we waste so much time doing the same thing over and over again rather than stepping back and seeing what it is that really needs to be done. And sometimes we look to the outside for blame rather than looking within for the solution.
And the greatest lesson of all that I got from wasting fifteen minutes trying to put a top on that needed the ice compartment before it closed, was that I have to trust my instincts. Instinctively I had known the iced compartment needed to go into the water bottle but I dismissed the thought because my brain told me it would sink to the bottom. So without even trying it, I gave up. But my daughter followed her instincts, her gut and just plopped the frozen bit into the water bottle and showed me what my inner voice had been telling me all along.

Had I listened to my inner voice, I could have saved myself a lot of bother. As well as my daughter. Teaching me in the most basic way that we always know what we need to do, we just have to take the time to listen to our inner voice. And follow it.

No comments:

Post a Comment