Getting Over it, or Getting Past it?
A client of mine is in the middle of what could be called a crisis. On multiple levels, the world they thought they lived in has come apart. Their job, marriage, and sense of being at home in themself and the world have all exploded. They’re in crisis mode. “I have to get over it so I can move forward” was how they put it.
That made me wonder, so I asked them, “do you think it might be easier to get past it than it would be to get over it?
I wasn’t even sure what I meant when I said that, but I had no trouble explaining the difference between getting over, and getting past.
Getting over something involves making sense of it
Getting over something involves making sense of it, in other words, understanding it. Getting past it is simply accepting what’s happened without having to understand it, which makes moving on with life a great deal simpler.
I know how tempting it is to want to understand something that’s happened in your life, but I’ve also learned there are a tremendous number of things that happen to us that simply have no explanation, no matter how hard we may search for them.
If I wait for an explanation that doesn’t exist, I’m guaranteed that getting over something that feels difficult in my life will go on for a very long time, and will occupy lots of real estate in my mind. When I can be comfortable without having an explanation
When I can be comfortable without having an explanation
When I can be comfortable without having an explanation, comfortable with not knowing, I’ve noticed the “problem” doesn’t need to take up much real estate in my mind. In other words, I’ve gotten past it. There’s nothing to obsess about. It saves a lot of time and effort.
When I believe I can’t be comfortable without an explanation, what I’m really doing is sending my brain into overdrive. And the faster my thinking becomes, the less clarity and more confusion I’m guaranteed. Does that sound like a way to get over something?
As soon as the human brain revs up to a certain speed, it’s no longer working for the thinker, it’s working against them. Confusion won’t get you past anything. It will keep you mired where you are, in confusion.
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Being comfortable with not knowing has become easier for me since I accepted, I mean really accepted without resistance, the truth that some things are unknowable.
That took me a while, and I spent a good part of that time believing that if I just looked harder, or thought about it more, I’d find the answer.
One day, I noticed that it had been a while since I’d spent time trying to unravel the reasons behind what had seemed like long-term problems in my life. I didn’t consciously decide to stop puzzling over certain issues; it just didn’t make sense to me anymore to spend my time and energy trying to puzzle out the unknown.
The result of that insight? Difficult issues that dominated so much of my thinking no longer appear to me as problems that need solving, or that need much thinking about.
Instead of being problems that I resist, they’ve become conditions I accept.
Have I gotten over the issues? I can’t answer that, because having gotten past them, they’re not really on my mind much anymore. If getting over them takes a little longer, that’s all right, because I know it will take care of itself, with no additional effort from me.
