Wallpaper

So, there I sat. Staring at the wall. Wondering how I was going to get all this fuc%#$@ wallpaper off. I was in the middle of a flip project, which started with stripping the walls of the previous 1970's wallpaper. If you've never pulled wallpaper off (you don't want to) you have a few methods of getting it off, but the main one being a steamer and a scraper. Using the steamer to loosen the glue behind the wallpaper and a scraper to help remove the wallpaper from the drywall underneath, BUT... sometimes the wallpaper doesn't want to come off. You go from taking down big sections to making tiny stabs with a scraper trying to peel off the last of the stubborn bits. Which brings us back to me, staring at the wall. I had been spending hours taking this wallpaper off of just one room, steaming, scraping, slowly making progress. Then an idea came to me (of course) in regards to the way I was scraping. I was predominantly moving my scraper in one direction, with a lot of effort and time.

This of course made me think about life...how sometimes we put in effort, time, energy, all into one direction and we don't get the results we desire, just as I sat frustrated with the scraper and the wall laden with wallpaper. So, I started to change it up. I moved the scraper in different directions, I tried different methods, angles, tools, you name it and my process began to speed up. I realized that sometimes we need to make a change, take a chance on something new, try a new method to at least see what the results could possibly be.

In life we often think we have this plan. I wrote about this quite some time ago, but I think that life will get in the way of your "plans". We always put effort into a direction that we think will give us our desired result. Then when things stagnate we decide to continue putting more effort in that direction in hopes that it will change or will move at a similar pace of previous attempts. Yet we become frustrated and give up or we lose our interest. Sometimes it takes a change, a redirection, or a break.

It can take effort, plus direction, plus a map, plus experimentation, plus a change of heart, plus.... What i'm trying to get at is that often times we think we know which place we're going, but our paths there need not be always in the conventional method. We can't be afraid of change. We can't be afraid of the new direction, or the new method. Just like the wallpaper sometimes you have to find something different to help you accomplish the goal.

I'm not saying that the conventional method won't get you where you want to be, but I recently saw something that sparked this article onto the page. "If you do not say what you think, then you will kill your unborn self". The idea being that if we don't try other paths, how will we know what we could become? Challenge the status quo, gain perspective, scrape in a different direction as you work towards your goals.

On purpose,

Matt