When my daughter was at work, she asked me to go by and speak to the roofer who was coming to her house to check on a leak.
The information I got from the roofer triggered a conditioned response: something might be wrong, it might get worse, and now I have to research it, take action, and make a decision. The mind starts running ahead of the problem.
The same thing can happen with something much smaller. A little discomfort from some dental work can be enough to start the same process: What is it? Is it getting worse? What do I need to do?
The roof situation and the tooth discomfort are different triggers, but the pattern underneath is the same.
This is where Sketch Stretching becomes interesting.
Instead of simply following the reaction, I can stretch it out on the paper. The information, the associations, the feedback, the feelings—all the pieces of the old conditioning become visible. What normally happens so quickly that it feels like one thing begins to separate into many things.
And when it is stretched out, I can see through the holes in the old thinking.
I can look directly at what is actually happening, research what needs to be researched, and make whatever decision needs to be made without continuing to feed the fear around it.
The problem may still be there, but in the larger context of everything else, it becomes a minor event in the foreground rather than the whole picture.
And something happens to the energy. The old conditioning has been stretched apart. The energy that was tied up in anticipating what might happen is no longer trapped there. It shifts and becomes free again.
Maybe that is the pivot to happiness—not making the problem disappear, but seeing through the conditioning around it and freeing the energy that was caught up in the problem.
