This week I experienced a sensation within myself that I have a hard time explaining, but warrants writing about.  A "problem" that I had been obsessing over for nearly a year was suddenly resolved with very little effort on my part, and come to think of it, was the very first route I should have taken when encountered with said problem.  Almost daily, my wandering monkey mind would be jumping to this problem and searching for possible solutions.  After trying several different ideas, and each one of them being thwarted almost cosmically, I would sometimes come to the conclusion that I simply must need to learn from this "problem" and that it was teaching me a valuable lesson in presence, patience, and living with the chaos.  I somehow felt that the universe was trying to tell me something, and that something was:  "Deal with it."
One night, while laying with Anya at bedtime, a simple comment from her prompted me to bring the problem to the attention of the very person who had the power to help fix my problem.  I was convinced that this person would try to talk me out of what I needed, or would tell me that the policies that be would not allow for a bend in the rules.
I was wrong.  She was more than willing to work with me.
And just like that, my problem was solved.
I stood there at work not 20 minutes later and found myself suddenly without something to obsess over.  My mind was so habitually stuck on fixing this problem, that when the problem was fixed, it felt odd not to have something to continue to work on.
Just when I think I've really come a long way (mentally, spiritually, emotionally), something like this really shows me how fixated I can become and how unwilling I am to let go of things that feel/seem intolerable.
But shouldn't we try to change things that are intolerable?  At what point do we throw up our hands and surrender?  I felt like I had literally thrown my hands up to this situation at least 3 times, and yet I still found myself back at the drawing board, trying to "fix" it.  Does this mean my ego just continued to take over?  Or was it that I was so blinded by my search for a fix and so convinced that it was unfix-able that I couldn't see the most obvious and most reasonable solution?
I know it's silly to try to figure it out, but I guess this is how I learn about myself.