Mon, September 14, 2009 - 10:05:21

Moment to Moment

Earlier this week, we read a wonderful article in The New York Times covering Jude Law’s critically acclaimed performance in Hamlet, which recently wrapped in London and will debut on Broadway later this month.  In his interview with Sarah Lyall, Law confesses that tackling the title role was daunting to say the least.  But, as he explains to the journalist, becoming Hamlet was an epic journey best travelled one small step at a time.

“Because of the speed and pace with which you have to wrench yourself up and down the emotional spectrum, you can’t quantify beforehand how far you have to go,” he said. “I was very daunted when I sat at the bottom of the mountain and looked at it as a whole and thought, ‘How do I get from here to the other side?’ But to watch where you’re going at the beginning of the play is the wrong way to go about it […] It’s a lot easier to cope with if you play moment to moment. That mirrors what Hamlet goes through and where he gets to in the end, when he talks about ‘The readiness is all.’ ”

Although we can’t all be Academy Award-nominated actors, each of us can use Law’s approach toward Hamlet throughout our lives to conquer even our most intimidating challenges.  Though our goals may differ, one powerful tactic can show us that nearly anything is possible.  And the path to this discovery starts with “thinking small.”

For many years, the prevailing wisdom has been to think big.  After all, big problems call for big solutions, right?  Well, quite frankly, we disagree.  In a culture where big cars, big houses, and big spending accounts reigned supreme, all this talk about big seems to have landed us in a world of trouble.  That’s why we think big is so 2008 and our new climate calls for a fresh approach:  the key to handling even life’s biggest challenges is to break them down into tiny, more manageable pieces.  Thinking small doesn’t mean running away from the problems you think you can’t solve, it means honing in on the details and finding smaller aspects that you can.  Then bit by bit, you’ll scale that mountain and before you know it you’ll achieve the impossible.

Posted by Linda and Robin