“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to when we created them” Albert Einstein.
I was sitting in my living room reading one of my favourite fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen, and suddenly I was startled by a noise from my wood burner. It wasn’t on so it shouldn’t have made any noise, and it wasn’t the typical sound of fire or warm iron – it was more like a knocking on the glass door, like someone was trying to get in or, rather, trying to get out. At first I thought it was just my imagination, awakened by the fairy tale. But the noise kept coming back, so I got up and looked through the glass. It was dark, so I couldn’t see much, but then suddenly a tiny creature came at me with all its powers and threw itself against the glass. Then I knew there was something in there.
I got a flashlight, and in the corner I saw that there was a little bird looking even more scared than I was. My first impulse was to open the door and let it out, but then I was overwhelmed by alarms sounding in my head – you know, the red alarm button we have, approximately in the centre of our brain, called the amygdalae, responsible for our fright and flight response – and pictures and films began to run through my brain, images of everything that could go wrong when I opened the door: the tiny but hard and pointy beak could hurt me, or maybe the bird would bite my finger or, worse, what if it went for my eyes? And then I got less dramatic and thought about practicalities, about the material damage to my living room and all the bird poo if it got loose. And then my thoughts got dramatic again because it started flying around and suddenly it seemed even more dangerous.
But at that point, my empathy kicked in and I thought, “Poor little thing. It must be more scared than I am, and it looks exhausted banging its head against the same wall. So my rational frontal lobe told me to protect my hands and get the little thing out before it died from banging its head against the glass. So I got my oven mitts – they are thick enough for the bird not to poke me with its beak, but soft enough to be gentle with the little one. As I walked to the kitchen to get my mitts, it occurred to my rational brain that it would be so easy for the bird to simply fly back up the chimney and find the hole in the net (which I put on the chimney to prevent these kinds of things from happening) instead of banging its head against the same door. And that made me think. How many times have I done that? How many people do I know who are doing that? How many times have I reminded myself, my family, my friends, my clients, “that we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them,” just as Einstein said.
Poor little bird, I took it gently out of its death trap. I didn’t want to scare it any more that it already was so I didn’t investigate to determine whether it was a male or female. I just opened the door to my garden on that chilly spring evening, and I felt the cold against my cheeks, I smelled the humid grass, and the clean air filled my lungs. I felt great as I set the little being down on the ground next to an old olive tree. It didn’t move, so I backed up slowly and glanced up at the black sky, beautifully decorated by the bright stars, and went back inside to resume my fairy tale.
We humans create habits of behaviour and we often repeat those behaviours regardless of whether or not the habit is beneficial for us. How many times has someone used this argument on you: “But that is what I always do!” The question to ask is, “how is that working out for you?” Have you ever had a friend that kept on repeating the same relationship by choosing the same kind of partner in a different person? Have you ever done that? Are you doing it? How is that working out for you? Have you ever used the same educational method on your children with a theme or behaviour they just didn’t seem to learn? How is that working out for you? Have you ever kept repeating the same behaviour even though you are not reaching your goal, whether it is for studies, business, sport, or personal life? What would happen if you kept trying new approaches until you succeeded? What would happen if you ventured outside your comfort zone and stopped running against the glass door? Fly out the way you came in, free yourself, and soar on your wings into an open sky filled with new possibilities.
This post was originally published on March 15 2019