Pause…

As I sat on the boardwalk looking at the waves crashing, I felt this slight stinging on my leg.

My initial reaction was to slap my leg to quickly get rid of the discomfort without seeing what it was coming from first. Then I paused and looked. It was a ladybug.

In life, we often close our eyes and blindly react. We want to avoid discomfort and react to fears before even giving ourselves a chance to face it.

This hit me as a direct metaphor. What if we just paused for one second? What if we opened our eyes to what is there? What if we allowed ourselves to face the fear present and tolerate the discomort?

Often we’d realize that there’s something really cool and beautiful waiting for us. We’d realize that our fears are lying to us. We’d realize that we are lucky.