The Slippery Slope

Photo by averie woodard on Unsplash

First of all, it’s important to understand that the potbound predicament is no respecter of age. The very tendrils that you have yourself grown into the soil around you can stifle you at any stage of your life: young, old, middle-aged, retired, at the peak of personal achievement or at the apogee of a professional career. For many people, the descent into becoming potbound is a perniciously gradual process, a continuous drip-drip accumulation of apparently minor issues. Although the realisation of the full extent of potbound damage may come as a sudden shock, rather like the dramatic demise of a majestic oak that no one realised was riddled with rot, it is not the focus of this book to deal with the aftermath of unexpected, cataclysmic events such as those occasioned by life-changing accidents or injuries. Although such tragic reversals may generate similar feelings and require similar solutions, the potbound phenomenon is a malaise that creeps up over time. Often the damage being done is so stealthy and surreptitious that you’re unaware of the harm being wrought and fail to spot the well-camouflaged signs until they’ve made quite serious inroads. You may, for instance, have sought refuge in sticking your head in the sand and successfully managed to ignore the fact that your innate tendency to grow and develop has somehow been arrested. Or perhaps you’ve never had the time to notice that instead of continuing to flourish and blossom, you’ve actually started to wilt and wither.

 Of course, it’s easy to identify that things aren’t working when you’re dealing with inanimate objects. Even dug in deep beneath the most substantial sand dune, most of us would still recognise when the boiler has exploded, the laptop has crashed or that we’ve just dropped our smartphone in a puddle, smashed the screen, and reversed over it with the car for good measure. It’s far more difficult to establish that there’s something seriously amiss when we’re considering a lifelong career, an intimate relationship or some other profoundly personal situation. When we find ourselves confronted with a complex set of circumstances, it’s often hard to separate what’s important and what’s not.

“When we find ourselves confronted with a complex set of circumstances, it’s often hard to separate what’s important and what’s not.”

If you struggle to get out of bed to go to work one grim winter’s morning, does that immediately mean that you should call it a day and quit your job? If your partner squeezes toothpaste from the middle of the tube, cracks his knuckles while watching television, or consistently taps the top of his boiled egg in that irritating fashion, does that necessarily warrant a call to the divorce lawyer? Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps none of these seemingly nebulous niggles would be sufficient in themselves to trigger a dramatic change of direction, but they might gradually lead you to a tipping point, or alert you to a more fundamental issue that you haven’t yet admitted or identified. It’s not the knuckle-cracking or the murderous urges in themselves, but it’s the way they add up to a dangerous accumulation of repressed feelings.

“None of us wants to fall at the next hurdle, but how do you know when you’re flogging a dead horse? ”

 Why are we so adept at covering up and ignoring our instincts? Perhaps part of the problem is that we’re conditioned to resist the idea that things aren’t working. From an early age we’re drip-fed the notion that, if we try hard enough, we’ll eventually overcome the problems that life throws at us. We live in a society that rightly prizes resilience, grit and perseverance. Just like previous world-war generations, we’re exhorted to pack all our troubles in our old kit bags and smile, smile, smile. Staying power, the stuff of true champions, is justifiably lauded. In such a competitive environment, no one feels comfortable looking like a quitter who hasn’t given 100 per cent commitment to the job in hand. None of us wants to fall at the next hurdle, but how do you know when you’re flogging a dead horse?

 Herein lies the rub. If you don’t learn how to ask yourself the right kind of questions, you’ll never have a hope in hell of coming up with the right kind of answers, and you risk finding yourself climbing to the top of a very impressive ladder only to discover that it’s up against the wrong wall. Or that you’ve ploughed a wonderfully straight furrow, but it’s in the wrong field. Feel free to dream up a suitably compelling metaphor to cover your own particular situation, but you get the idea: fail to question your own feelings, motivations and behaviours and you’re soon on the path to being potbound.

“I believe the right questions involve the heart, as opposed to the head, far more frequently than we imagine. ”

 So how do we start framing the kind of questions that might deliver answers best geared to ensure our overall wellness, well-being and sense of purpose? I believe the right questions involve the heart, as opposed to the head, far more frequently than we imagine. Too often our conscious selves elect to ignore our unconscious wisdom, often at the expense of physical and mental health. Sometimes we may even be aware of this clash between our intellectual and emotional selves but we make the mistake of brushing aside our gut feelings and pushing on regardless. Far more frequently we simply fail to recognise what our heart is trying to tell us. The writing might be on the wall, but we haven’t acquired the emotional literacy to read what the message says. In the absence of some handy key to decipher the Rosetta Stone of our innermost feelings, we could be mired in our potbound predicament forever until we learn to crack our own code.