Lenses

Today as I noticed the lenses in my glasses were very dirty.  Trying to wipe them clean did little good without lens cleaner, which I did not have on hand at that time.  It was frustrating.  Without my glasses, the world was blurry, but with my glasses, it was also fuzzy.  What was particularly interesting to me about all of this was that I ended up taking off my glasses at work yesterday because everything was too hard to see with them on.  Rather than looking to see if they needed to be cleaned, I assumed there was something going on with my eyes or the prescription that was causing problems.

It's kind of like that with life too.  All too often, we see something is not quite right, but rather than look for a simple answer, we insist things must be more complicated than that.  And we try to fix things as if there must be some overarching issue.  For example, if I'm frustrated about something, I tend to take a while and analyze why this thing is frustrating me and then I get more frustrated because I don't know what's wrong.

Sometimes we need to dig deeper and find the bigger problem.  Maybe I'm frustrated because I have some unresolved conflict going on that needs to be addressed.  Sometimes, though, it really is as simple as it seems.  I'm frustrated because something is not working the way I think it should.  I can adjust my parameters, walk away for a bit, or try to make whatever it is fit within my parameters.

Introspection and digging deeper into issues is not an entirely bad thing.  But when doing that makes things worse, it's time to back off and deal with things in a step by step manner.  Remember your glasses may just need to be washed.