About that time, another assistant happened to walk by on the other side of my laptop and said, “Hey, did you know your power cord came unplugged?” Sure enough, the power cord was lying helplessly there on the floor. The only way the other assistant could have seen that my power cord was unplugged was if she were standing on the opposite side of my computer. She plugged it in and my computer came back to life. Problem solved.
In life, one of the reasons we get stuck is because we can only see one side of the problem at a time. We can stare at that side of the problem, and poke and prod it for days and still not see the solution. We find it difficult to walk around to the other side of the problem because it never occurs to us that there might be a different side to it. It never occurs to us that someone else’s vantage point might actually be better than ours. We are like the proverbial blind man trying to describe an entire elephant based solely on the part of the elephant he is experiencing at that moment. We think the part represents the whole. It’s all we can know because it’s all we are experiencing in that moment. It consumes us.