I woke up one morning not too long ago on a cold, rainy, morning and saw a crew of city workers outside shoveling hot tar for the umpteenth millionth time into a number of potholes on the street outside. Sadly, they’ll be back again in the Spring to do the exact same process all over again, as every six months that tar becomes worn away enough to return to the same pothole-strewn street. As I watched them for a minute, wishing they could grasp the concept that repaving the entire street would create a more permanent solution, I saw a parallel to how life can normally be for many of us.
How often do you look for those temporary patches, i.e. quick fixes, when those potholes appear in your life? Potholes like health issues, relationship problems, financial woes, addictions, and the like.
All too frequently, I myself sought out many of those temporary patches that merely covered up an underlying problem and never led to any real solution that fixed it. Patches like having to take more and more medications to cover up what was actually causing me depression and anxiety. Patches like leaving one partner for another, jumping from relationship to relationship, constantly thinking it was always them and not me, believing the next one would be better. Patches like borrowing more and more money to fix a problem that only created an ever-increasing pile of debt I wasn’t ever going to be able to repay. And patches like attempting to put limits on things I was becoming addicted to, such as having one drink, or one hit of a drug, or looking at 10 minutes of porn, or gambling $20 at a casino, even though I never did keep to any of them.
That’s because temporary patches, no matter what they are, are just that, temporary. Like that tar being placed in those potholes on the street in front of my house that will become totally undone in six months from now or less, all of the quick fixes I ever utilized in life constantly became undone for me at some point as well. That’s how I learned the only solution was to repave my entire life with better streets. While the upfront cost of this has been a lot more frustration, hassle, and quite often pain, I know in the long run it will pay off.
Unfortunately, many choose to never go through this process and play that long game so to speak. That’s because human beings tend to be impatient people, which in turn cause them to regularly place hot tar into their potholes, solely to just keep going on in life hoping they won’t miss a step. Yet, eventually this action always catches up to them, causing them to only have to seek more of that tar to refill the hole, never fully grasping that if they just faced the pothole head-on, they could find a way to repave it so that it won’t keep reappearing.
Thankfully I’m not trying to fill my potholes anymore with tar. Instead, I’m working on repaving my own existence with the help of 12 Step recovery and a ton of faith. Faith that God can and will repave me in a way so that I’m not always going to be a pot-hole strewn street who is in need of regular reoccurrences of repair…
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
