When a walk doesn’t turn out how you expect….
Yesterday I had an embarassing accident. Despite the fact I thought I was being very smart and acting with foresight. But I’m glad I did.
I went for a walk on Crosby beach. Having walked twenty minutes out from my car along the promenade path I decided I’d rather walk back closer to the waves. So I navigated the steps down to the sand and took a careful look ahead of me. This beach tends, at low tide to have long puddle areas, so it’s wise to look ahead and make sure you have a route back to the promendade. I picked out a dry route and set off pausing a while now and again to gaze out to sea, sip tea from my travel mug and allow my mind to ponder some of the choices facing me at the moment.
Unfortunately, while I was having all my lofty thoughts on Life, the tide had sneakily begun to fill up a rivulet that had blocked off my dry escape route. No matter, I thought, I’m enjoying the walk. I’ll just walk back the way I came, back to the promendade. I turned back and after a while saw over to my right a patch between puddles that was damp but eminently walkable over. A short cut! I went to inspect. I thought there was probably enough surface water to dampen the bottom edges of my leather boots, but I could live with that to save fifteen minutes of walking.
So I put my best foot forward only to see that foot sink as the sand shifted. Only I didn’t see it fast enough to allow my brain to tell me not to also put the other foot on the same patch of sand. This time I sank up to my knee. I hauled the first foot out, tried for a drier looking spot and sank that leg down up to the knee too. By now I was doing an excellent impression of the cast iron statues by Anthonly Gormley which are scattered about this beach and which become submersed at high tide. Cold, cloying sand was in my socks and my jeans were sodden. I tried to move and heard a slurping sound as the quicksand swallowed me an extra few inches. I instinctively started to push out with my arms but my hands started to sink and my recently broken right elbow objected to even a slight pressure in that direction.
Right. Not good.
Ask for help.
I looked around. Of course all the dog walkers had suddenly vanished. This was up to me to sort out. And suddenly it was quite scary. The tide was coming in and I was stuck and alone. Not good. And then I remembered. On one of my late night Internet surfing sessions I had ended up, for reasons I now cannot recall, on a page telling me how to get out of quicksand. Lean back. Alter your centre of gravity. So I sat down in the puddle and leaned back. That caused my legs to rise as I floated more on the waterlogged sand. From there I managed to pull free and half-roll-half crawl on my left side to solid ground. And then I walked covered in mud all the way back to the car.
But you know, I had a big grin on my face as I squelched along, because the reason I was on that beach in the first place is that I had just come from a counselling session in which I had been talking about how coaching and counselling combined had helped me get from a deep dark place of depression to a place where, finally I felt I could feel joy when I woke up in the morning. More, I now felt I had some clarity on what my purpose in life was. I was talking about a forthcoming charity trip to Zambia and conversations I had been having about how to help with the fundraising for the building of a school in Liberia. As I left the counsellor I felt that joy swell up behind my breast bone so much that the tall Liverpool buildings seemed to be squashing it. I wanted to be somewhere wide open. Somewhere I could get a sense of the whole world being open to me.
So I went to the sea to watch the waves. To be by water that, like the energy of our thoughts, time and money, flows freely from one land to another and back again if only we don’t dam it up. Being gripped by quicksand seemed like the perfect metaphor for my former life of stress and depression, of believing myself pointless, inadequate and useless. Stuck in a cold place. The advice Change the centre of your gravity encaspulated perfectly the work I had done in my talking therapy and coaching conversations.
And it was the resources I had — we all have, deep down inside ourselves — that ultimately enabled me to get out of the mire. Both the depression and the sand. We all have what we need already. Sometimes we just need expert help to access it. That’s exactly what coaching does — helps you find a way to get from where you are but don’t want to be, to where you want to be.
Over the last year I have changed the centre of my gravity from worry about my future to gratitude for the abundance of my now. From the stress of maintaining a perfect career woman image to finding ways to use my talents to be of service. From having a secret love of Judaism to being an active participant in a synagogue community. From feeling I have to hide my true self behind a mask to being open and vulnerable in my public writing. The results have been that I unstuck myself from the despression and rolled free. Now I am walking, with my chest full of joy, towards the great life I have to come.
Where is your centre of gravity right now? Would you benefit from leaning back a bit and shifting it elsewhere?
