Sometimes You Need Someone Outside the Washing Machine

There comes a point in every person's life when you seem to be stuck in a situation that you think will break you and there is no way out. You can't see around it or over it. You can't see the top of it. You just know that it's there. And it's also rather like being trapped inside a washing machine.

Stay with me here.

When you find yourself in the washing machine on spin cycle, you're being thrown left, right, backwards and forwards so much that, by the end of it, you're dizzy. You've spent so much time thinking about the problem, worrying about the problem and trying to find your way out of the problem that you don't seem to have enough brain power left to actually figure out what to do about it.

As a result, you become despondent.

You can't forget about the problem because you can't forget about anything when you're being thrown around on spin cycle. But you also can't quite see the situation you're in clearly enough to work out what to do next. You stop thinking about the predicament that you find yourself in objectively. Sometimes, you need somebody who isn't in the washing machine with you.

The view from outside

If you prefer the more conventional metaphor, perhaps you can't see the wood for the trees. But I like my washing machine.

Someone standing outside it isn't being thrown around. They're not dizzy. They're not caught up in everything that has happened before. They can look through the little glass door and see what's actually going on in there. And sometimes they can see a solution that seems embarrassingly obvious once somebody points it out.

Something very similar happened to me recently.

When thinking harder doesn't help

It was such a small thing, but it made me realise something. I had been so busy trying to solve the problem that I had made the problem bigger.And I think we do this far more often than we realise. When something worries us, our instinct is often to think about it more. We turn it over. Examine it. Replay it. Consider every possible outcome. Then we go back to the beginning and do it all over again.

We tell ourselves that if we just think hard enough, eventually the answer will appear. But sometimes thinking harder isn't the answer. Sometimes you've been on spin cycle for too long. The person outside the washing machine has something you don't have at that particular moment: distance. They aren't carrying the worry, frustration, fear or history attached to the problem. They haven't spent hours constructing increasingly complicated solutions in their head.

They can simply look at what is in front of them. And occasionally they'll say something ridiculously simple like, "Why don't you borrow a trolley?"

Let someone look through the glass

There is nothing wrong with trying to solve our own problems. We should. But I am beginning to think there is also something to be said for recognising when we've been spinning for too long.

Ask someone else what they see.

Tell them the problem. Let them look at it without all the noise you've attached to it. You don't necessarily have to take their advice, and they certainly won't always have the answer. But they might see something you can't. Because when you're being thrown left, right, backwards and forwards inside the washing machine, your view of the world becomes understandably distorted.

Sometimes the solution isn't another hour of thinking. Sometimes you just need somebody standing outside the washing machine to look through the glass and say:

"Have you thought about this?"

And perhaps that is the thing I am learning. We don't always have to find our way out of difficult situations entirely on our own. Sometimes the smartest thing we can do is admit that we've been going around in circles for so long that we can no longer see the obvious. Ask someone else. Listen to what they see. You might discover that the enormous, complicated problem you've been trying desperately to solve doesn't need an enormous, complicated solution after all.