Switching Controls to Manual

Beach holidays can be wonderful things. Imagine it, you’re lying there with your back sinking into the coral sand, the sky lit up and expanding across the horizon and the sea rhythmically pattering up the shore and then sliding back into the ocean. You take a deep breath and let it out for what seems like a lifetime. Time slows down and it’s as if your mind is hovering high in the warm thermals above you. The world is a million miles away. But for a moment your thinking drifts into a problem; a difficulty at work; a snag in a relationship; a complicated decision you need to take. And as you retrieve the problem from your memory and begin to re-constitute it, you notice something is different. It’s the same difficult problem but somehow, as you lie there, it has taken new shape. What you experienced previously as tenseness, a tightening in the chest, there is now a feeling of openness, of possibility. Before, where options appeared limited, now magically, they seem abundant. And as well as more choices seeming available to you, you see different ways of tackling the problem; approaches and solutions that are in every way untypical for you; solutions that you imagine other people finding, certainly not you. In short, as you lie there doing nothing, problems that previously seemed intractable have opened up like an oyster washed onto the shore, and the answers are there for the taking.