A friend of mine has recently been widowed and this has, understandably, pushed her into an unthinkable world of ‘how will I cope’.  Another friend’s husband had a stroke and the resulting effects are likely to be life-long.   A third pal has a handicapped child who will need care throughout her life.   Another friend has debt problems.  Others have relationship difficulties.  These are great mountains indeed.   In fact even without such major complications to deal with in life, for many, there are daily accumulations of small problems, building up and up until something comes along as the ‘final straw’ to our ability to cope.

These are times when problems can seem so huge, they are impossibly insurmountable.  There is no solution, no way to ‘be’. 

I’m not about to make light of any of the problems described.  They are grim and they are real.  However, when the future looks impossible and the task of living is so very hard – how do you function?  Well, it’s the answer to the age-old riddle: How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.  One second at a time, then one minute a time, then one hour, one day – living and making the best decisions and actions that you can manage at each given moment.  

And even without the ‘big’ life problems to tackle, it’s easy to let our fears and imagination, create elephants which perhaps, aren’t really elephants.  Have you created any large grey animals lately?  Could they, in fact, be deconstructed and turned into bite-sized problems which may turn out, after all, to be tackle-able?

People tell me about the knots in their stomachs and we sometimes metaphorically pull them out and look at them.  Usually the description is about the knot being comprised of a tangle of all sorts of small problems grouped together in a horrible mass…….and they just need to be untangled and dismantled and the knot begins to go away, because separated, the problems look smaller and able to be tackled.

If you have a mountain to climb and no helicopter, then it’s just going to have to be one step at a time.  So break the problems down into smaller separate ‘steps’ or ‘elephant bites’ – and work out what is in your power to tackle.   Then decide which is the first small action you can take that will make a difference….and off you go.   Remember, no elephants!  They mess up the butter in the fridge with their footprints anyway.