embrace it! - or don't...
At the heart of a good story is always a dilemma.
The protagonist needs an outcome but in order to get that outcome they generally create a new problem that conflicts with the resolution of the first.
You have 24 hours to head across country to meet with the love of your life, but the only way you can get there just happens to be with their ex - who, as a jealous and possessive nutcase, has vowed to ruin the life of anyone who would seek to take their place at your lovers side. They know that someone is on the scene but they don’t know that it is you. Can you keep your identity safe long enough, because the closer you get to your destination, the chance of them twigging it’s you is going to go up exponentially. It’s a ticking time bomb of a situation just waiting to go off. Oh, did I forgot to mention? You also have a medical condition that means every time that you are asked a direct question, you cannot lie.
Good Luck!
Bye!
the thing about dilemmas...
The thing about dilemmas is they're not problems that gets solved. Dilemmas require resolutions - meaning that mostly they are not situations that can be fixed. This resolution happens when we grow bigger than the situation - when we transcend it - when we face the facts - or the truth. When we do, we grow into a version of ourselves that is bigger than the discomfort of the contrary forces it contains.
How?
Good question.
Often it is a case of sitting in the middle of it until a solution - a resolving third, presents itself.
Generally, this requires that we sit with the discomfort of the truth we are trying to avoid.
And the way the universe usually plays this out as that we have to stick with it right up to the point where we feel like all hope has gone, or the moment just before.
Like they say, the truth will set you free, but it might just kick you down the stairs first.
history...
This motive is in stories everywhere, it is the journey to the underworld and the return, it is the story of the shaman - his flesh is flayed from his bones and his bones remade of iron before his body being reassembled.
These are emblematic of the dilemmas inherent in life.
It comes back to intent again.
What do you really want?
The issue with the dilemma is often that we can't see a way of getting what we want or what we need. The situation often feels hopeless. From that place we can go into fear and anxiety and even depression.
Often, as uncomfortable as this is, as desperate as it can sometimes feel, it is the threshold we need to cross in order to resolve out the tension within us. The part of us that wants the thing that we want, in the way that we want it, or believes we need to have it that way, needs to be outgrown or let go of.
up to it's old tricks again...
We need to face a truth about life and find a way to balance our needs and our wants with that truth. When that happens we grow - or at least another part of us grows - the version of us that is bigger, that can contain the dilemma and all of the inherent tension it contains.
This is not an easy path, but it is the path the wholeness, and the price is often the acceptance of legitimate suffering - not to live in that place forever but to grow a version of ourselves that can contain it - which is the path to a more integrated version of ourselves that can sit with these opposites.
For me, this is the process of evolution.
Survive and evolve or die.
This is the invitation of life.
