Fellow Strugglers.
“We are all fellow strugglers…” said Trevor Silvester, on the first day of my Cognitive Hypnotherapy course at the Quest Institute. Its a phrase that has come to resonate with me over time. On that day I had been sitting listening to Trevor speak and he was constantly interrupted by fellow students. He answered all their questions with patience and care. I, on the other hand, had started to feel irritated. Who were these people? Why were they asking so many questions? Why didn’t they just listen?? I judged them because they simply did not fit with my version of how you should behave.
At the end of that first morning we broke for lunch and Trevor stopped us briefly, “You know…I just want to thank you for asking such great questions. Its fantastic to have such interested and enthusiastic students.” I went away and thought over my sandwich and a cup of tea. Why did he find the questioning ok? Why did it irritate me so much?
I learned the answer to that question shortly after, thanks to Trevor. “We are all fellow strugglers, doing the best we can with what we’ve got”
Its funny, isn’t it, that we all go about our daily lives assuming so much… I assumed, for a long time, that anyone who didn’t think like me was obviously a little bit strange. Well that’s a terrible thing to admit, isn’t it? The thing is…there are so many different types of people…introverts, extroverts, big picture people, fine detail people, early people, late people…all different, but all living their lives in the best way they can with the tools they have.
When you start to understand that, it makes you step back and take a moment. People are not living their lives differently to you for the sole intention of being annoying… They are who they are. Most of us go through life wanting, fundamentally, to love and be loved. Its not always easy and we make mistakes. But that’s ok. We are allowed to make mistakes. And just because we made a mistake today it doesn’t mean we can’t start tomorrow afresh.
Our lives are like a story and our future pages are there, waiting to be written. Its up to us how we write our lives and its ok to not be perfect. Once we all understand that we are fellow strugglers, it makes the world a little easier to understand.