The puddle

After an amazing storm I was on my way to see a client trying to find shortcuts along the way to arrive on time.

I decided to go through a park I have never visited before but, it was on the way to my client’s office.  I was walking very fast and suddenly, after a curve, I found myself in front of a huge puddle.

At first I thought trying to jump over it or, slowly walk through it, but the image of a video of a car sinking in an apparently innocent puddle came to my mind.   This video showed a car crossing a seemingly inoffensive puddle in a street of a big city, but it seems it was covering a huge “gap”, the car unknowingly kept advancing and suddenly disappeared into the “puddle”.

The video did not show whether the driver was able to come out alive from there, but the image remained very clear in my mind. 

Nothing in the topology of that park could give me a hint about the “depth”, but when I was standing in front of that miniature pond, the image of the car sinking made me stop right away. Something inside me told me it was safe to walk through this site with caution so I wouldn’t spoil my shoes, but the image of me disappearing like that car made me think twice before continuing my trip.

Then I thought about all those times I had done the same in others aspects in my life. Sometimes I saw a “problem” or situation that looked scary, but as soon as I had decided to face it and “walk through it” it was not as awful as I had thought before. And in the end that situation ended up totally inoffensive and easy to accomplish.

But other times, things got really rough when I had decided to “cross the puddle” without the expected caution and I had ended up at the bottom of the problem, desperately trying to find the way out.

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