Written by Dan Brown, MA (Director of Operations, Senior Clinician)
Living in Boston, you live with history all around you. You get used to it and almost expect it. Our home is on the Paul Revere trail, and just down the road on Paul’s horse route is the Hancock-Clarke House in Lexington. Paul actually lived there as a kid, and Rev. John Hancock owned and lived there in 1775. On Paul’s famous ride, he stopped there around midnight to warn Hancock and Sam Adams that the British were in fact coming and then headed off to Concord to continue to alert the militia.
There is a museum at the Hancock-Clarke House that has on display a journal belonging to someone who lived there during that time. The Hancock House is just steps away from Lexington Green where the first shots were fired of the American Revolution. This journal often chronicled the weather, the people visiting the home, the meals served and events of the day.
April 18, 1775 the day was evidently a lovely spring day, according to the journal, with sun and good meals planned. Then one would think April 19, 1775, the day the first shots were fired, there would be a long entry with drama about the events and its significance to the cause. There was no such entry. That morning was overcast, the flowers were starting to pop up, and there was some kind of dust up at Lexington’s green near Buckman Tavern. But instead of a long winded entry, the writer talked about how lunch was going to be a nice stew later that day. I do love a good stew and spring flowers.
The reason I share this is that sometimes we “overcook” events that happen in our day, giving it too much significance or taking it as a general theme of how bad things seem to happen to us and only us. In the Hancock House journal, the writer could have made all sorts of comments about what he or she was seeing and what was going on in the world at that time. Sure there wasn’t Twitter or Facebook to connect people and events, but this journalist would have known what was going on but he or she chose not to report that. Seemingly the meal was as important as the shots fired that were supposedly heard around the world. It was almost as if the writer, being only a short walk away, barely heard the shots and went about their day.
When it comes to those “overcooked” events, we must work to challenge those automatic thoughts and test them to see if they are actually true. A good way to do this is (funny enough) through journaling. Now you might “overcook” the events from time to time in your journal and that’s okay. Or you might only allow for good things into your journal and that’s okay too. The key is to start to see the trends in journaling.
From our side of the office we would call that catastrophizing and black and white thinking. If you are prone to making every event a catastrophe challenge that thought and don’t let it go to its negative conclusion. Or you might look at X or Y event as simply being great or terrible. If you failed at something reframe it into a learning experience instead of a failure.
Wisdom is the skill to interpret God’s hand in the midst of life’s struggle and mundane moments. And the ability to truly understand why things happen and what they mean can be hidden. We can sit in that struggle and be curious about our feelings and what God might be doing without “overcooking” things. And I promise if you do you’ll watch how God will show you Himself in those experiences.