Avoiding and Ostrich-ing

I am an ostrich, head buried in the sand, refusing to acknowledge my problems, shortcomings, or the difficulties around me.

And can you blame me? Life is HARD, people! Yes, we have first-world problems (football season is still almost 7 months away, the battery life on my iPhone stinks, I just had to do some minor car repair on my otherwise trusty Camry, sometimes I have to wear my glasses when my eyes get irritated and running or exercising in glasses is the pits) but aside from these roll-your-eyes-at-the-entitled-American problems, the world is a tough place. There are wars, failing economies, human trafficking rings, famines, droughts, melting polar ice caps. On a personal level there are people I care about dealing with sickness, depression, crushing debt and continued unemployment.

When you read the newspaper or watch the nightly news (Ha! I kid, who does those things anymore? Obviously I meant "When Facebook and/or Twitter tells us what's happening in the world") who can blame me for being overwhelmed and retreating inside my safe shell*? Surely, if I pretend everything is going to be fine, it WILL be fine, won't it?

Except this: Never once in the history of ever has avoiding a problem made it (really and truly) go away. David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear once, but problems are here to stay (sigh, I miss the 80s. They were such simpler times).

This truth makes me hurt. It makes me ache. For serious problems it makes me cry because those problems are huge and overwhelming and bigger than anything I alone can do.

For smaller problems - my own, individual issues - it frustrates and annoys me. Because these are problems I can face and take steps to solve and don't. And that's on me. I have no one else to blame. And blaming others is a time-honored tradition that I use to perpetuate the cycle of avoiding my problems.

I am a person of faith and I know that God isn't asking me, Jennifer, to solve all of the world's problems on my own. I get that - no need to remind me. But, in the interest of plain honesty, I believe that it's really easy to use that as a cop-out and an excuse to do nothing. Ouch. No pointing fingers here, unless I'm pointing them at myself.

As for the minor problems? As for what's wrong with me, the things I can fix? I'm learning - well, trying to learn would be a better description - to view these areas as challenges to accept rather than challenges to avoid.

I think we fall into traps of inevitability. "I've always been fat," we'll say, and then because we view that as true (and it was true for me!) then we feel that the logical conclusion is that we must always be fat. But day by day I'm learning that that's a logical fallacy. Just because something has always been true in the past doesn't mean it must necessarily always be true. Not if we take steps - however small - to change it.

Fill in your inevitable challenge, the one you've been avoiding in hopes that it will, one day, magically disappear (Oh, David Copperfield, where art thou?). I'll get the ball rolling on this one:
- I'm a procrastinator.
- I'm not bad with money but I'm not so good, either.
- I am occasionally disorganized to the point of losing things.
- I don't pray enough. I'm undisciplined in my spiritual life.
- I don't send out Christmas cards. (OK, yeah, this one's an area of challenge I can live with indefinitely.)

How do we tackle these areas? What are steps we take, day by day, to change from the person we are and don't want to be into the person who accepts the challenge and initiates real, lasting change?

To be clear, people, I'm not talking about perfection. I'm most definitely not a perfectionist and no one who knows me would confuse me for one. But this isn't about striving for unattainable perfection. It's about removing my head from the sand and acknowledging that change, indeed, is possible. And it starts with me. Now.


*You caught that, didn't you, sharp-eyed reader? Why yes, I did change animal metaphors in the middle of the post. Now I'm a turtle. I needed a shell for a while.