Actually I wanted to write about this yesterday, but somehow the other idea took charge, so what happened to me last Saturday or so needed to wait.
And it wasn’t that special what happened last Saturday, but somehow it also was. And it’s worth thinking about I guess, it’s worth contemplating.
And you may or not know, but for quite a while I have been trying to start with the tools section in this website. Tools like helping you create a desire document or helping you get more clarity on your goals and how to reach them. And me being me I want to build that part of the site in my own way, according to the standards of Active Discovery Designs. As I believe building it in WordPress, according to the WordPress standards, will be too complicated and too time consuming. And next to that I don’t want to depend on the way WordPress is going as I don’t have good experience with Open Source systems when you have to support them, want to maintain them, want to expand them. And don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Open Source systems as e.g. most of the web servers on the internet are even running on Open Source systems like LInux, PHP and mySQL. And until now this whole site has been built with WordPress according to the WordPress standards.
Anyhow, I didn’t want to talk about Open Source systems and such, but about my experience with something that had been bothering me for weeks already, maybe even months. As I was looking for a way to create a simple signup procedure where you only have to enter your e-mail address and a password to either sign in to this site or to register. And yes, at the same time go to my own, much simpler, way of programming a website, a web application. But I got stuck.
And getting stuck when writing software is quite a common thing, at least for me. Sometimes you ‘just don’t see it’ and you get stuck in some very weird process where you just can’t find the bug, can’t find the error, can’t find why something doesn’t work. And it can keep you busy for days, where in the end the solution is often just one or two lines of code or some very stupid simple programming error. So I got stuck in the problem of automatically logging the user in after signing up, after entering a new e-mail address. And no, this website is not a full time job or something, especially the programming part, but I did spend quite some hours spent over a few weeks to solve this problem. And I couldn’t find it, I just couldn’t find why it didn’t work. And last Saturday I did one small search in Google and suddenly I found the solution as also other people had experienced the same thing. And indeed, also this time the solution took like fifteen minutes or less to implement. And it will take me probably hours to take out all the ‘debugging code’ that I have added to find the problem. But again, I don’t want to talk about software development.
No, I wanted to talk about that sometimes, or even mostly, solutions just ‘come to you’. And that is maybe also what the teachings of Abraham Hicks are trying to tell us. That all the pushing and shoving and hammering that we often do when things don’t work, when we want to put something into place, are not needed or even can have a negative impact. As when I would have just searched in a relaxed way in Google instead of trying and trying and trying to solve this problem I would have saved a lot of time, effort, energy and annoyance. So yes, often stopping and thinking works better than just ‘work, work, work’.
And I remember another sample of a similar situation. As I was on the way to the wake of a friend of mine who had died. And I didn’t know exactly where it was, but the name of the funeral home made me think it was somewhere near a subdivision with the same name. And that subdivision is something like six kilometers away from the city center, the city center where I started my search. And it took me I think even hours to find out I was in the wrong place. While if I would have just asked someone in the city center, where I was, close to the funeral home, I would have saved a lot of time and effort and even money. But no, I just had a wrong perception and was too, well, maybe preoccupied, with what I thought was right, to consider asking.
So better think and ask first, before doing a lot of effort.