One Way To Approach Relationships That Feel Impossible

I don’t know about you, but I get easily overwhelmed by problems. I know not everyone is this way. Some people are undeterred by problems. Some charge forward in their life, despite problems. Others confront the problems, head on, with an air of confidence that they’ll figure out a way to solve it.

But not me. For me, problems always seem kind of delicate.

I could confront the problem, I think to myself, but I don’t want to make the problem worse. I could charge forward with my life, but I’ll know that problem is there, and sooner or later I’m convinced it will come back to haunt me. No matter what, I never feel totally sure about the “right” way to solve a problem.

The other day, I had an argument with a friend.

This wasn’t the first time we had argued. In fact, our friendship has been up and down, back and forth for awhile now, and although I love this friend and really wanted to salvage the relationship, I wasn’t sure how we were going to solve our problem.

After the last conversation with this friend, I hung up the phone feeling sick.

*photo credit: what_marty_sees, Creative Commons

It seemed like, every time we talked, things got worse, not better. And while I probably would have sat around all day, trying to figure out what to do, my husband suggested I stop thinking about it for a few hours and do something neutral. “Maybe the answer will just come to you,” he said.

So I found a project.

For weeks now, there has been this huge cardboard box sitting in our bedroom. Inside the box was a beautiful mother of pearl lamp my father-in-law bought when he was in Guam many years ago. And when we moved into our new apartment in January, he offered to give it to us, and we were honored.

But since it had been in a box for years, and was fairly tangled, we just hadn’t gotten around to hanging it.

So I pulled it out of the box and got to work.

At first glance, I’ll be honest, the untangling job seemed impossible. In fact, you could tell the lamp would be beautiful, but it didn’t look beautiful all tangled up and sitting on my bed. All the tiny pieces of the lamp were obviously delicate—each of the pearls strung together with a thin piece of string. I worried that, if you pulled any one piece too firmly, the whole thing would fall apart.

But I started the only way that seemed logical—with one knot, at the bottom, because I figured it would be better to work my way up.

One knot at a time, I untangled that lamp.

I would get one knot untangled, and that would reveal another knot that needed to be untangled. At certain moments I wanted to pull hard, out of frustration or because I figured it would be faster that way, but I resisted the urge, knowing if I pulled to hard it could break the whole thing.

So gently, delicately, I just dealt with one knot at a time.

It took me more than an hour. Halfway through, my husband came to help. We worked together on that lamp, untangling and untangling until it was back to normal again.

We hung it in our bedroom, and it was beautiful.

The whole experience it made me think about how the best way to approach problems is often the most counter-intuitive way to approach them—slowly, calmly, one thing at at time. The problem might seem impossible to solve. It might seem too delicate. But if we’re willing to approach one knot at a time, we’ll eventually make progress with our problems.

I called my friend and told her I was sorry. I told her I wasn’t sure exactly what to say, just yet, but that I loved her and wanted to make things better. I asked if we could just focus on one thing at a time. “If there was one thing I could do to rebuild trust with you,” I asked, “what would it be?”

I asked her if we could just start there.

And suddenly, what seemed like an impossible situation didn’t seem so impossible anymore. It’s not all solved today. It won’t all be solved tomorrow. But slowly but surely we’ll untie one knot at a time.

And before we know it, we’ll be beautiful.

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From Storyline:

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One Way To Approach Relationships That Feel Impossible is a post from: Storyline Blog