I hover in the midst of a sea. The sea envelops me, encompasses me. It is all I can see for miles around. My life is the sea. I am in the sea. The sea owns me.

But I want to walk on solid land again so I wade through the sea, wondering where to start. With the simplest thing. Good. With the item closest to my hand. Yes.

It’s not much. It’s not nearly enough. But it’s a start. And from that simple beginning my mind begins to clear and my vision of what I can do clears a corresponding amount. With my action of doing something, I have made the sea’s vast power over me begin to recede.

Now I see how I can start to tame this sea. How I can corral certain categories of items together and find them even if they’re not necessarily organised into neatness. I can see what I have in this group of items and it’s easier to understand that I don’t need every single item here. Some of this is flotsam and jetsam and does not belong in my life.

I know I am only working on the surface of the sea but I also understand that what meets my eyes every morning is important. As this tide ebbs it will be time to go under the surface, to the deeper levels. I will feel more comfortable about doing that once the surface sea has been cleared. I will know that I am capable. I will know that, unlike King Canute, this sea is mine to command.

Imagine life as a pathway. Instead of the normal analogy of uphill being your challenges and downhill being a time of coasting along fine with no problems, let’s imagine the pathway is flat and that there are different ways of traversing.

Sometimes you walk along quite comfortably. This is when everything is going along fine, at a pace that suits you. Sometimes we have years and years like this. We usually think silly thoughts like “Nothing ever changes” during this part of our life. Sometimes we get a bit bored, even.

But then there’s that moment when life puts you on top of a circus ball and you have to do some pretty fancy footwork just to keep your balance. You might go backwards along the path or mark time as you try to get a handle on how to drive this thing. What a challenge! But you might be good at it and still power along your path, hyper-attention required to keep on the ball but still travelling forward. Exhausting and requiring constant focus, but it can be done.

Another challenge might be in the form of sticky mud that tries to hold you back. If you’re not prepared to get muddy and do the very hard yards, you won’t get through. But if you angle your body a bit forward and use all the impulsion potential within you, you’ll gradually wade through this difficult patch.

Some people, though, seem to rise above change. They’re the ones we describe as ‘taking everything in their stride’. They seem to do it a bit more easily than the rest of us. I think I know how they do it.

Instead of walking, they have built a resilience and acceptance that acts like a conveyor. They still have the same challenges but they manage to keep their wits about them and as long as they stay balanced and attentive to what’s happening in the moment, their faster movement is actually easier than the walking pace. They have probably ditched some non-essential things along the way so they can easily keep their attention on the present.

Being adaptable and accepting of change, dealing with it at once rather than sitting back and hoping it will go away, is like having a conveyor belt under us making the journey a little easier. There is less energy expended when you accept things as they are and don’t dwell heavily on the past or the future – or what might have been or what ‘should’ be.

We all have a choice about how we want to deal with our challenges. We can become mired in them or rise above them. We can mark time or forge forward. We may not be able to change the path but we can master better ways of travelling along it.

There is an amazing clarity of vision that people get at certain times. Someone whose house has just burned down will say that the only truly important thing was that no lives were lost. Someone who knows they are dying gains great acuity about what’s important in life and what’s not.

But most of us, most of the time, are wandering around in a kind of mire. We might think that we’re doing our best, but what are we doing? Our best at what?

Sometimes, perhaps often, we should stop. Come to a full and utter stop for a period of time so that we can truly look at ourselves, our lives, what we’re spending our time on, if we’re honouring our passions and realising our dreams.

Honouring our passions. Many of us don’t even recognise our passions any more. We’re so entrenched in our working lives, domestic chores, things that we ‘have’ to do that we not only don’t do something concrete towards our passions, we don’t even know what they are any more.

This is the time for subtraction, not addition. Clarity of vision comes from having less in your life, not more. Paring down physical possessions can help. Lessening the amount your eyes look at and therefore your brain has to process is a brilliant idea. Having routines that work on autopilot can also be helpful. Your brain can rest from the minutia, the dross, and in doing so has the energy for more important work.

Getting clarity on what you spend your time thinking about is another step in the right direction. If you spend a great deal of your time thinking, “They should” or “I wish” then you are wasting your precious resource in an utterly stupid way. Of course, most of us do it and we don’t know how to stop. That doesn’t make it less stupid.

We spend a great deal of time doing unimportant things. Once we’ve pruned the television and the computer time, we can look around and truly evaluate what we spend our days doing. It’s fairly likely that we’ll find huge blocks of time that, if not exactly wasted, could be freed up with just a little thought or a new way of doings things. I’m not really thinking about getting more efficient, here. Rather, of finding ways to do a little less on an ongoing basis so our minds have time to spend on important things.

I certainly don’t want to get to the end of my life and wonder why I didn’t spend a bit of time working out what were the truly important things in my life … and doing them.