Dead Ends: How Do I Get Out?

We've admitted that we're in one (or many) dead ends in any number of areas in our lives. We've admitted that these do happen, and hopefully we've taken the time review the map of how eventually got to this dead end where we never intended to be in the first place.

Good news: Now it's time to get out!

But how do we get out, we may ask? The situation we are in seems to have gone for so long and the opportunities we have to get out, let alone change things, are so limited. We've made our list of how we got here and frankly, we don't think we could recreate the directions of how we arrived, let alone trace our steps to the fork in the road where we came from.

Happily, there are multiple options:

1) Retrace the path: This certainly doesn't work in all situations - we can't for example, go back twenty years in the past and knowing what we know now, take a pass on a relationship - but it does work in some. Example: In debt? How did we get here? By spending too much. Why did we spend to much? We wanted x and y, so we got a credit card. Solution: retrace to the problem (credit card, spending) and change that.

2) Preposition our way out: Another piece of good news (two in one post!) is that our Dead Ends are not necessarily the same as real, physical Dead Ends like cul-de-sacs. For those, there is only one entrance and exit. Other Dead Ends are not (usual) spatial in nature, and so the linear path of retracing our steps may not be the only way to go.

Preposition our way out? Think of the common prepositions we use daily: over, under, around, through, across, beneath, up down (here's a longer list). Take those prepositions and apply them to our Dead End: Is the Dead End something we can go around or under (Like a difficult person or situation)? Is the Dead End something we can go across (like a similar career field or staying with our music but learning to play a different instrument)? Is our Dead End something we can simply go through (a change which, if executed, will move us through the issue)?

We've been trained in a world that moves in a linear, one dimensional fashion. It's time to be spatially expansive in how we address our lives.

3) Plan the Change, and Execute: Sometimes Dead Ends are simply that: Dead Ends that, no matter how hard we try, we're not going to be able to back, around, through or over. In those cases, there's really nothing to do except plan to make a significant change, one that does not follow this Dead End in any way, and execute it. The important point here is that, once the situation has been recognized as irredeemable, to intellectually accept that a change needs to be made, plan the change, and do it.

There is only one Dead End (in this life, anyway) which cannot be changed: Death, the sort of ultimate Dead End. All others are lesser than this immutable fact and thus, something can be done. We just need to find the will and (often) the creative thought and iron will to do it.