The other morning my wife and I were admonishing our eight year old daughter for some misbehavior. My daughter’s coping mechanism is to shy away. She walked away from the breakfast table as she didn’t want to deal with the reprimand. We were telling her that she has to deal with the problem, to fix it and were starting our normal cycle of encouraging her to re-engage in life. Then from nowhere, our four-year old pipes up and says, “If you run away from your problems you’ll get lost.” The wisdom that young minds put together is amazing. I knew instantly, it would be something I would want blog about.

It’s so common to become defensive or ignore the problems that come up on a daily basis whether it be with others, ourselves or just life itself. The easy path is to turn away only to find the problem returns in another monstrous form or in the same form but exaggerated beyond our coping mechanism. Stress and strain abound when we don’t look ourselves in the mirror and deal with the reality of ourselves. The easy path we take becomes more cumbersome in the long run. We do not support our daily business with our short sighted-ness. A little attention to the consequences of our actions or inaction can help us understand when looking in the mirror is to our benefit. We find ourselves when we correct negative or avoidance behavior as soon it occurs. It’s not the easy way out. However, accepting the reality of ourselves becomes a habit if we do it a bit every day. And, in doing so, it’s a lot harder to lose ourselves.