Podcast Short: Digging Holes - Throwing Away Our Shovels

“When I’m at the bottom looking up, the main question may not be ‘how do I get out of this hole?’ In reality, the main question might be ‘how do I get rid of the shovel that I used to dig it?”

We dig holes.  Lots of them.  With all kinds of shovels.  But the interesting thing is that we dig most of these holes without even recognizing that we’re digging holes right in the middle of digging them.  We dig a lot of holes and we have all kinds of shovels to dig them with.  We dig these holes through the decisions that we make, or the people that we tend to spend our time with, or the activities that we engage in, or the lifestyle choices that we’ve made, or the way that we spend our money, or the belief systems that we adhere to, or the habits that we develop, or the choices that we make to advance our careers, or the people that we marry and the people that we don’t.  We dig all kinds of holes with all kinds of shovels.

And maybe what we should do with our lives is stop digging holes.  And maybe we should stop all the digging by being thoughtful about what we’re doing.  Maybe we should stop the digging by refusing to be reactive.  By rejecting greedy impulses and refusing to get caught up in those impulses.  By starting to ask who we’re listening to and why.  Maybe we need to stop digging holes by asking where our ethics went, or who we’re hanging around with, or what habits we need to seriously consider getting rid of, or what principles we’ve left behind us that maybe we need to put in front of us, or the incessant denial that we live in and all of the rationalizes that we create to justify that denial.  Maybe we need to stop all the digging.

So take a moment.  Put down all of your shovels.  Be brutally honest with yourself and ask yourself these questions, as well as some others that maybe you should be asking yourself.  Put down the shovels, stop the digging, and get rid of the holes.  Life is a whole lot less stressful when you’re not spending the better part of it trying to figure out how you’re going to get out of the hole that you’re currently in, and what you’re going to do to avoid falling into the next one.  Take a moment, get rid of the shovels, and stop the digging.