I scream.

Adaptation is often about forward-thinking. Often, it requires one to step outside of oneself, to pause in the middle of an unenviable moment and try to envision what is possible. Remembering that attachment often yields to suffering helps in this process. Doing that, when one has managed to step beyond the need for the attachment, the imagination can observe a wider, objective point of view. This can, in turn, allow one to accept options that might not have seemed available when one was fighting for one's way. What may have seemed the most undesirable thing in the world might then show itself as the path toward something wonderful and previously unperceived.

Overcoming is often about present-thinking. Often, it's the place within the self that gets reached when one's patience, tested by all that openness and adaptation, reaches its subjective limit and the time becomes right for resistance and struggle. Many schools of spirituality demand the ascetic, yielding way that results in pure adaptation, but what of the power of the self that bursts forward in times of outrage and distress? Can this not also be a path toward empowerment and positive change? Can we not also be the actors, the escorts of change, as well as its passive recipients? In the maxim Do as thou wilt, the verb is about action and effort and struggle.

Perhaps balance in living lies in determining, within the self, where each approach suits best. Reed or oak? Light or fire?

And then there are those moments when the way to proceed becomes clouded, and one's disappointment and annoyance might stand in the way of healthy movement. Those are the moments for ice cream.