Difficulties

After the group meditation tonight, a video of Shifu Sheng Yen was shown regarding coping with obstacles and challenges. One of the things that most impacted me was Shifu's remarks that difficulties can be reframed as ways to improve character and mature oneself. They don't need to be avoided, and people don't need to always seek an easy answer or solution to feel comfortable. As  I had shared with the group members today, part of my difficulty lies in being attached to "100% success" and wanting to impress people at work with how I can handle problems. Quite often, it's hard for  me to admit when I can only complete 20% or so of what needs to be completed, and it seems a sign of weakness in a competitive world to ask for help. But I also understand that people need each other to meet their targets, and sometimes the low percentage is simply a sign of the effort really required to complete a task..
   I find that one good way to manage difficulties is to focus on the task rather than focusing on 'the person' or the self. If I am tasked with something quite mundane and  not that rewarding, I am often focused on  the result or the benefit I can incur  from the task.  But let's  face it: some tasks aren't particularly inspiring at all, and they are simply done to maintain one's social and physical existence. An example of this might be paying one's taxes. The process of doing so requires resources and the initiative to get to the mailbox, but none of this proves to be all that rewarding. It is, in the words of a former high school colleague, one  of those 'things you just gotta do' that offer no real reward. Looking  at Shifu's video tonight, I realized that it might help to see the process of difficulty or 'task' not as a burden but as a way to strengthen a person's resolve to do things without a sense of self.
   If I can see all experiences as phenomena that are pointing to the mind, that is probably an even better practice, though it is more subtle. The best way to describe this approach might be to see that all experiences are phenomena itself. Not privileging one experience as 'more rewarding' than others allows me to see them all equally, and I can let go of the desire to gain from one or avoid the other. The practice can even become a kind of challenge, where I try to determine how well I can let go into the experience rather than retaining a sense of time or space, or wanting to do something else.
    Under this latter view, there is really no difficulty that ends up being a waste of time, futile or pointless. They are all just ways of helping a person to let go of the baggage of a fixed 'self' which stands to gain or lose from anything. Once a person can truly stop identifying so much with that self and see it as impermanent, then all the tasks are equally valid ways to learn and grow. It simply is a matter of balancing necessity and managing the different shifting priorities of the moment.