Trouble | Career Angles

“Trouble creates a capacity to handle it . . . Needed as a friend, for you’ll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.”

~Oliver Wendell Holmes

I don’t think I was more than eight years old when I was robbed by two older boys while out with a friend. I was proudly showing off my new watch to him when they came over and asked to see it. I held it up for him proudly and he said, “I can’t see it. Take it off and show me.” I’m sure you can figure out what happened next. We couldn’t find them after they ran off, probably hiding behind cars to avoid us.

Trouble appears in many different forms.

Problems

Difficulties

Concerns

Issues

Bothers

Inconveniences

There are a lot more that are even more subtle.

The thing I want to focus on here is that trouble often involves a mental component. An inconvenience is something that you don’t want to do. A bother is a disturbance. Problems are often a puzzle that needs to be figured out. Difficulties? Who decided that they were difficulties? How they become a difficulty?

All these things are situations where we haven’t figured out how to handle it. We become paralyzed with…