“Let me tell you a story about the invisible pebble.
I went on a 3-mile run this morning.
It’s not something I do daily, but (almost) every Sunday, I get my adult-ish arse outside the fingerprint-smudged walls of my noisy, messy home and let my feet beat the pavement. I listen to music, and I let my mind wander as I feel myself mentally and physically getting stronger.
Today, about a quarter of a way through my run, I felt a small pebble in my left shoe.
It was uncomfortable.
It was annoying.
I was frustrated that with every step I took, I could feel it and no matter what I did (besides totally stopping my run to get it out), I couldn’t shake it to a new, less burdensome spot.
I considered taking a pause, taking my shoe off, and removing the infuriating fudger, but here’s what happened when I didn’t:
It went away.
Or perhaps it was never there at all?
I finished my 3.3-mile run in 37.34 minutes, and when I got home and took off my shoe, there was no pebble to be found, not near the sole, and not in my sock.
But I swear it was there – until it wasn’t.
And here’s how I’m relating that to life…
Often, we struggle with pebbles in our day-to-day lives.
Small (and sometimes big) challenges we have to overcome if we wanna get where we are going.
When we focus on any threat to our inner peace and tunnel-vision in on how debilitating it is and how intolerable it is for us, we are dead in the water, forgetting we are our own damn life raft fully capable of mentally swimming ourselves back to where we need and want to be – at peace.
As a present work-in-progress, anxiety-donning, reformed perfectionist, I struggle with turning everyday molehills into mountains.
And I have an incredibly hard time consistently believing that no mountain is too big for me to climb.
But, when you just keep going…
when you just keep swimming…
when you just keep running…
when you just keep trusting…
when you just keep believing…
when you just keep trying…
you overcome.
You overcome the real pebbles and the invisible ones, too.”
This story was submitted to Love What Matters by Nicole Merritt of Jthreenme. You can follow her on Facebook, her website, or podcast. Get her new book, Musings for Mom, here. Submit your own story here. Be sure to subscribe to our free email newsletter for our best stories, and YouTube for our best videos.
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