Joram Mutenge
Life is all about solving problems
Lately, it has dawned on me that much of what we call life revolves around solving problems. It doesn’t matter who you are; no one goes through life without having something to fix. These problems can range from minor inconveniences to major challenges. The point is that there is always something to work on, something to improve, or something to resolve.
As an adult, I often find myself reflecting on my life. I look to the past to understand where I am coming from and to the future to gain a clearer sense of where I am going. It’s during these moments of reflection that I realize just how many problems I have solved and how many still lie ahead. You need to see a dentist because your premolar has become unusually sensitive. That’s a problem to solve. You have just moved into a new apartment because your old neighborhood was unbearably noisy. That’s a problem solved. You return from the grocery store only to realize that you forgot to buy tomatoes, so now you have to drive back. Another problem to solve. You finally finish a course you struggled with and pass, though not with flying colors. That’s another problem solved. It sometimes feels as though life delights in throwing problems at us, and as long as we are alive, our job is to keep trying to solve them.
Of course, we cannot solve every problem life throws our way, but sitting back and allowing those problems to ruin us would be reckless. So we keep trying, working harder and looking for ways forward. Sometimes, we are fortunate enough to resolve a problem completely. Other times, we have to accept that certain problems may never go away entirely. We learn to live with them, even as we continue to work around them.
Perhaps the trickiest problems are the ones we face within ourselves. These are the struggles we can’t simply walk away from. If a friend’s behavior begins to conflict with your values, you can choose to end the friendship. But when your own behavior goes against your values, you cannot walk away from yourself. Internal problems are particularly difficult to confront because, when we are the source of our own struggles, we often have ready-made excuses to justify our behavior. These problems demand our undivided attention because resolving them requires us to look inward, acknowledge our shortcomings, and take responsibility for changing them. Yet not all internal struggles are our fault. Some arise from circumstances beyond our control, such as the difficulty of accepting that we’re not conventionally attractiveness.
There comes a time in everyone’s life when the saying “When it rains, it pours” rings painfully true. It’s that moment when you feel as though you are being bombarded by several problems at once. The default reaction for many people in such situations is to worry excessively, sometimes to the point of despair. But perhaps remembering that the business of life is, in many ways, about solving problems can help us approach these moments differently. Instead of allowing worry to overwhelm us, we can focus on what needs to be done and tackle each problem as it comes. We may not be able to solve everything at once, but we can keep moving forward, one problem at a time.
If life delights in throwing problems at us, then perhaps we should learn to delight in solving them. After all, problems are an inevitable part of being alive. We may not get to choose every challenge we face, but we can choose how we respond to it. And perhaps that is what living is all about: not reaching a point where we have no problems left to solve, but learning to face them with patience, courage, and a willingness to keep going.
