Letting Go Can Break the Stalemate

ELLIOT OLADIPO YEMITAN

Recently, I was opening a bottle that had a screw top. Grabbing the trunk with my left hand, I turned the top anticlockwise very vigorously, but it did not budge.

Then I put the bottle down gently and, after pausing a bit, decided to try again. To my surprise, the top came off easily, like a loosened nut, with very little effort! It then dawned on me that I had at first been pressing the threads of the bottle and those of the screw top together and thus had been making things unnecessarily difficult. But as soon as I abandoned the unnecessary, extreme pressure, the screw top came off easily.

How like the experience of many of us when we face a hard problem! Whenever a challenging situation presents itself, we tend to assume we have an uphill task. We then start to struggle unduly, often to fulfill human outlining. But in the light of my encounter with the bottle top, we may need to realize we've been wasting effort, perhaps actually blocking a channel for solving the difficulty.

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