Turning problems into challenges

Editorial, Normal

LIFE is full of challenges.
Many take these challenges to be difficulties.
Difficulties very quickly become problems.
Problems multiply and, often, become insurmountable. They tend to overwhelm and are strength sapping, leading to health problems and cause drastic mistakes which can cost friends, jobs and even lives.
Challenges, on the other hand, test that part of us that is indomitable, that rises up to the occasion. Challenges bring out the best in all of us. And, it must be challenges that we think of whenever hardships face us.
That will not require an extraordinary chance in character, or even in appearance, to go from the sissy weakling to a hulking giant to beat the beach bully as depicted in cartoons. Often, it is persistence that will do the trick.
The soldiers who were engaged in one the greatest and most decisive battles of World War II, called the Battle of the Bulge, did not know they were engaged in such a grand battle. Some played cards in their fox holes. Others engaged in physical man-to-man combat with the Germans. One took pot shots at passing German tanks and then retired to his fox hole and rested. Only after the great battle had been fought, the soldiers on both sides realised the enormity of what had taken place.
The big picture actually emerges in the end when all is assessed, when the sum total of our individual efforts amounts something of such great significance as to be the turning point in a war.
Not every one of us is asked to or do ourselves feel inclined to climb Mt Everest or walk the Kokoda Track.
While challenges require us to rise up to the occasion, often that occasion merely means getting up, getting dressed and getting ready for work in the mornings when the bed is the most welcome and inviting alternative.
It is simple everyday moments when we doubt God and think our boss is an idiot and the missus is probably seeing somebody behind our backs that we must realise we are called upon to summon sufficient reserves to go on with life, to ignore the taunts that life throws at us from time to time.
Nation-building is like the Battle of the Bulge. Everybody, from the minister dictating policies to direct the course of the nation to the cleaning man emptying the rubbish bin and the student finishing her exam papers, is called upon to do just his or her bit, nothing more, nothing less.
Limited as individuals living within a finite physical being with no capacity to divide ourselves into two beings and transporting ourselves into two places at the same time without killing ourselves, we can only do what we are called to do within the limits of our strength, skills and in the time given to each of us.
In time, our honest application of ourselves through the daily rigour of an ordinary life translates itself into national statistics such as improved gross domestic product or a surplus in the balance of trade and current account figures.
That is all we are called upon to do – be ourselves, do what we are called to do and do it well.
Often, we see those who appear to be living a sumptuous lifestyle around us and we regret our own seemingly mundane life. We wish for the kind of life our friends and neighbours live without realising that they, too, have their share of challenges that they must face in life.
Nobody lives a life free of troubles and would be lying through the teeth if they claimed they are living such a lifestyle.
Even those who claim to have an abiding faith in God, that they never despair or doubt, must pass through a time when they see a loved one pass away or die in an accident. They pray and wish for the tragedy to pass them, but it will not.
Neither will a speeding bullet zigzag to avoid a peace-loving man if he stands in the way of that bullet.
Though we all want to be like those soccer stars in South Africa, or even dream of repeating the power strokes by Ryan Pini, we must realise that each of us have our own champion moments; the mother beholding her infant child after a difficult labour; the child with an “A” grading following an average performance throughout the year; and a job seeker whose letter returns with a job offer.
Nothing that life throws at us should ever present itself as a problem; everything should be challenges for us all.
What a difference we could make the world if that were all of our attitudes.