Could you choose a more compassionate metaphor?

If you sometimes talk to yourself like this, there’s a story today to remind us that there’s usually a more compassionate metaphor to choose …

You’re stuck. You can’t do it. You’ve ground to a halt. You must get going, get out.

*Photo by Hansueli Krapf [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]*

Push. Push harder.

This is an obstacle and you can conquer it if you just push harder against it.

Be stronger.

Steamroller on through.

And here’s a story from Greece:

The woman sitting on the rock looked down at me in the sea. “Having a good swim?” I told her I was planning to swim round to the harbour and back. “Take it easy,” she said, “like walking – just keep going at a steady pace. And if anything goes wrong, don’t panic.”

And she told me how once her leg had got tangled in a discarded fishing net, and it was remembering the advice not to panic that had saved her. Instead of panicking, she stayed calm and kept breathing steadily. That enabled her to go under the water and remove the net from her ankle. If she had panicked, it could have pulled her under.

It wasn’t brute force that untangled the net but deliberately softening in order to be more responsive, floating in the supportive sea while working out what to do, and then calmly doing it.