#58 You Cannot Fix What You Cannot See

I got back from spring break feeling refreshed and ready to dive back into real life and then I walked into my house and saw everything differently. The shower tile. The refrigerator drawer. The laundry room. Nothing “became” dirty while I was gone. I just finally had enough space to see what had been there all along. That moment sparked a bigger question: what else do we miss simply because we are too close to it? 

We take that idea beyond home routines and into the places that matter most. I talk honestly about how marriage can drift when we get stuck managing schedules and repeating the same conversations, and how tension can become so normal we stop noticing it. I also share how parenting can pull us into tunnel vision, especially when we are worried about a child, and how easy it is to overfunction or carry emotional weight without realizing it. 

Then we move into spiritual clarity. When life is loud and busy, it can feel like God is quiet, but often we are the ones without room to listen. I reflect on how Jesus withdrew to pray, and why stepping away and slowing down changes our awareness, interrupts thought patterns, and widens perspective. You will leave with simple, practical ways to “step away” even if you cannot take a vacation: small environment changes, relational resets, quiet time with God, journaling, and even visiting different churches to wake up your attention again. 

If you have been craving answers, peace, or direction, consider this a gentle push to stop doing more and start seeing more. Subscribe, share this with a friend who feels stuck, and leave a review so more women can find the show.

Click the link below to set up a free discovery call to begin your transformation today.  Or email me @ smurph923.sm@gmail.com to find out more about how I can help.  

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Transcript

Welcome And Podcast Purpose

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome to my podcast. My name is Sharon Murphy, and I'm a certified life and mindset coach and I help women who seek to be happy and holy. Each week I'll bring you tools and insights to help you on your journey to the heights. I'm so glad you're here.

Back From Vacation With Energy

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Hello and welcome back. Happy Thursday for all of you that are listening to this when I release it. And happy day to everyone else. As you can probably tell, I'm I'm pretty excited to be here with you today. I'm just coming off of our spring break vacation that we had as our family, our family trip that I've talked about on here before. Every spring we go to Florida, and I'm just feeling really energized and really ready to get back to work. Vacations are amazing and they're awesome and I love them. We spend weeks looking forward to them, but I I like getting back to my routines just as much. And so I'm really ready to dive back into work and I'm all recharged and ready to

Coming Home To Sudden Clarity

SPEAKER_00 0:57

go. Speaking of vacations, have you ever come back? Have you ever come home from a vacation and suddenly you saw everything in your house completely differently? Or maybe, maybe not differently, but more clearly. Well, this is what happened to me. We got back yesterday, just yesterday. You know, I walked in the house after being gone and I went into our bathroom. I noticed our shower. We have a kind of a big walk-in shower, and I took I was taking a shower, whatever. Anyway, and I noticed it and I thought, wow, this shower is really, it's really dirty. I mean, not to be clear, not not super gross dirty, but like, wow, I need to clean this shower. And it's kind of a big large walk-in tile shower. So I need a ladder if I'm gonna get up there and clean the ceiling and stuff like that. And because it's such a big one, sometimes there'll be mold starting on the ceilings. And so I started to just notice, I was like, wow, I really need to start cleaning this again. It needs a good cleaning. Anyway, that was just one thing. It it continued on, you guys. Honestly, I I went into the refrigerator, I started to empty out the cooler of the food we had brought, and I looked in there and I was, you know, the drawer where my fruit was in. It's like, wow, you know, it just gets a little cruddy from some of the fruit and stuff in there. And I'm like, this is terrible. I gotta clean this. I went into my laundry room. Same thing. I started to notice around my washing machine where you put the clothes in, you know, the rim. I'm like, wow, this is really dirty. I gotta clean this. It you get the idea. This continued throughout every part of my home. And you know, so as I'm trying to unpack from my vacation, I am using vinegar and water and I'm wiping out my the part of my Keurig where it has the water in. All these things, everything just became the whole point is everything became very clear to me. I saw it almost like, oh, how did I not notice this before? It wasn't like it, it wasn't, it didn't suddenly become dirty while I was gone. Now, granted, my I had one son living at home, so it wasn't like the house was empty, but he did not, he did not make all these things appear dirty like they were, right? It was just that I hadn't noticed them before. The reality is that it had been that way when I left. I just didn't see it. I was doing other things. I was busy in my routines, so I didn't notice it. But what the important thing is what got me thinking about was what else in my life, what else in all of our lives are we not seeing because we're too immersed in it? Not because we're ignoring it, but maybe just because we're too close to it, because we're in the same routines day in and day out. Maybe we're having the same conversations with the same people or the same sort of conversations, right? The same conversations with our friends. We talk about the same people, the same, you know, maybe it's the same complaints. Maybe we're carrying the same responsibilities day in and day out. And so when something becomes it becomes familiar, it can also become invisible. It's almost as if we don't notice it. And I've talked about this in other podcasts way back when, but it's like the drive to work. Very often you won't even recognize, you won't even remember it. If you drive the same route every single day, you you know, somebody would say, Did you see this on that side of the road? Or did you see this house had something happen to it? And you're like, I never even saw it because we're too used to it. We're too immersed in it. So this is what I want to talk

When Familiar Life Turns Invisible

SPEAKER_00 4:13

about today. And I want to talk about, of course, not just your house and how it can appear dirty, but I want how this shows up in our lives and in the different areas of our lives.

Marriage Drift And Communication Shifts

SPEAKER_00 4:23

So let's talk about how this shows up in our relationships. And let's start with marriage. When you're in a day-to-day rhythm and you're just managing your schedules, you start having the same conversations, you're typically navigating the same stressors. But what happens is you stop seeing your relationship for what it is. You stop paying attention to things, right? You might not even notice that you've you've become disconnected with your partner or with your spouse, or with any relationship really, but in your marriage, are you still working towards the same goals? Do you take time to discuss your dreams and your future like you did when you were first together? How has the communication shifted? We know how communication can change in relationships that we kind of start to take for granted. I know I can get a little snarky and I can get short or or tense, maybe a little, I don't know, hard or commanding without even realizing it. Maybe in your relationship there's tension that's crept in and you're not even aware of it. And it's not because you don't care, but maybe it's just become normal for you. We talk about our patterns and our patterns of thinking and how they become habits. Well, that's what happens in all of our relationships and in every area of our life. We fall into these routines and they become patterns and then they become habits. And that's why sometimes in our marriages, we know of people that have been married for 20, 30, or 40 years plus years, and without realizing it, they they've drifted apart because they've not taken the time to step back and analyze or really assess things. And then unfortunately, sometimes we see those marriages disintegrate.

Parenting Without Losing Perspective

SPEAKER_00 6:04

Now, this is true also, I talked about marriages, but it's also true with our relationships in our families with our children. And this is where it can be really powerful because when we're constantly in their business, or like I would say, too close to the situation, right? We're always trying to handle like maybe there's a difficult situation with a certain child, or maybe multiple children. When we're so close to it, we sometimes just start to, that's that's all we do. We can kind of obsess about it or overthink about it or worry, you know, we're trying to help or guide, but what happens is we've lost perspective. We don't even realize maybe what we're carrying emotionally, how we've maybe stepped too closely and gotten too involved in making their decisions for their lives, and that we maybe haven't been giving them the space they need to help them grow. And again, it's because we're just too immersed in the situation. And it's because it just feels normal for us. So again, I talked about the house, how and I hadn't noticed it. Well, the same is true when we actually step away from our relationships in our marriage and in with our children, we start to see things a little differently when we come back into it. And this is why sometimes when we have conversations with other people, say you're talking with other people about a child or a situation with a child that you're struggling with, they might come in and offer you a piece of advice or a perspective and you're thinking, wow, how did I not see that? It's because we're so close to it. It's because we haven't, we're not able to see it for what it is. And sometimes it's a matter of like when we're so close, you know, it's just like anything else that we kind of get tunnel vision. And that's why when we step back, we can have a much broader perspective.

Quiet Space To Hear God

SPEAKER_00 7:43

So this isn't just in our relationships, though, because this affects our spiritual life as well. When we're constantly in motion and we're in the day-to-day of our lives, we're busy, right? We're distracted, we're busy solving problems, we're thinking ahead, we're just all the ways that we learn to navigate and to manage our lives. What happens is it becomes very difficult for us to hear God clearly. And I've talked about this before. We can sometimes mistake this for God not speaking to us, and yet that's not the case. God always wants to speak to us, God is always waiting for us. It's just a matter of if we're allowing him the space to, or the space for us to hear him, or the space for him to to speak to us. And we need to remember, I'm talking about stepping away or, you know, the vacation, how I came back and I had a different perspective. Think about in scripture how often Jesus would step away and Jesus withdrew. Jesus went up on a mountain or he went off to pray. He went away from the crowds, he went away from all the demands to pray, to be still, and to reconnect. If Jesus needed that much time away, if he needed to step away from the routines of his life, to step out of what he was doing in his work, in his routines, how much more do we? I'm talking about stepping away and changing, you know, our environment. And and that's really what this is about. But there's also more than just changing your environment. It's about changing your awareness. Because that's what stepping away or or moving away, that's what it does. It's stepping out of a routine and it changes your awareness. Because what happens is your mind begins to slow down. We give it the space to slow down. And I believe when your mind slows down and you're taking out taken out of the routines, your patterns are interrupted. Your thought patterns, I mean. And so that's really, really important. When we can interrupt our thought patterns and those routines, that's when we create space to let new thoughts in, to see things differently. Your emotions settle. And that is how our perspective can widen. And then all of a sudden we start to see things. When we come back, we start to see things that maybe have always been there that we weren't aware of. And it's I talked about my house being dirty. Those were things that could be construed as negative. They were negative to me. But this is true also for us to be able to see the things that we maybe weren't recognizing as positive things that we weren't, we weren't aware of. And that's why sometimes the we talk about the practice of gratitude because we're not aware of those things. So when we we call those to mind, we bring those to mind. So suddenly, when we're seeing things that weren't always there, good or bad, this is where in our marriages, you might, you might all of a sudden become aware of areas of disconnection or areas that need nurturing. Now, when it comes to our children and our families, we might see areas where we've been, maybe we've been overfunctioning, maybe we've been trying to do too much. And it's time to release some control. Maybe you just see your child in a new light, or maybe, maybe better yet, from their perspective, their point of view. We can just get a different, different angle on things. And when it comes to our faith, we might start to see how we felt disconnected from God, but we might have clarity about why that is. We might start to see where we've been relying on our own strength. Or maybe we just we'll start to recognize some area of sin in our lives that becomes very clear to us. Now, I want to just say that when I'm talking about stepping away, I am talking physically about stepping away from your routines in your life, for sure. Now, I know that's not always possible for us in different states in our lives, and it doesn't have to be long periods of time. But I want to just say that sometimes I know I had a friend, a dear friend of mine, who passed away a number of years ago. And she talked about how she would uh make a retreat, a silent retreat by herself. Most of them were silent, I believe. But she would take a retreat by herself to step out of her life. And she did it, she tried to do it at least twice a year in spring and fall. But sometimes she would do it a little more, I think. And I know her husband as well, and he's he didn't mean this, I don't believe, in a in a bad way. He just kind of has a sense of humor. And I'm not sure he shared the same, he wasn't on the same faith journey as her. Let's just say that. And he would make jokes about the fact of how he goes, I think she was just trying to get out of, you know, her duties, or she was avoiding us, or she was trying to get away from us. I think he was kind of saying, like, you know, the kids, because she had several kids and the household chores and duties. And he was only joking, he was meaning it in fun. But that can, especially as women, as men as well, parents, we can have a hard time finding it reasonable to step out of our busyness of our lives to go and make a retreat or do something like that. It's difficult to step away. We feel like, you know, what's gonna happen with our home? You know, is it gonna fall apart? Is things gonna be taken care of? We can feel like it's selfish, or we feel like it's just not productive. So I want to just speak to that and say it's actually probably one of the most responsible things that you can do. Because if we don't take the time to step away from the busyness of our lives, you're just gonna continue to operate on autopilot and you're gonna be stuck in patterns that you can't even see. And likely you're gonna miss things in front of you that might be obvious to others. So for my friend, when she would talk about coming back from these retreats, she just said, I was just refreshed and renewed. Now, that that makes sense because she was going on spiritual retreats, so she was really kind of supercharged. But any separation, any break from things can even be helpful. Because when you create that space, you come back, you're gonna be more grounded, you're gonna be more aware, your perspective will have changed, whether you know it or not.

Simple Ways To Step Away

SPEAKER_00 13:42

So, what does this actually look like? How do we how do we apply this? So it doesn't have to be a vacation, although I'm a huge advocate for vacations and vacations of all kinds. That looks very, very different for for everybody. It doesn't have to be in this particular situation that I was talking about, I went with my husband and my kids. So did I gain a lot of clarity or a lot of awareness about my relationships? No. In in this situation, I'm talking about it was about my house because I was away from my house. But this can be how we can use it in all the areas of our lives. And I do think it's important for us to realize that you actually need to change your environment, even if it's for a day or two, to just go away to, like I said, make a retreat, like I talked about my friend. But maybe it's a weekend getaway with your spouse. Whatever can create space for you from your everyday routines, from your normal patterns of being. I think multiple times a year. But if you can only do it once, that that's fine, then just start there. But let's just say that you're someone who says, I just can't, in this state of life, I just find it really hard to get away. There are some ways you can even just incorporate this in small moments. And what I mean by that is just finding ways to step away from your normal routines, to get out of your normal habits of being, those patterns. And I know this sounds counterintuitive or maybe contradictory to what I normally speak of because I'm a huge advocate of routines and how they can build structure in our lives and help us to create what we want more of in our lives. And I think it's important for that. But like I said, there's a great value in stepping away from those routines so that we can gain a different perspective, about clarity, basically, about our lives and and what things look like. And it's almost like it we're given different different lens to look through. Let's talk about stepping away physically, and that just means changing your environment. Small ways you can do this is just even just going somewhere, somewhere new, somewhere you've not gone before. So trying a new coffee shop. Or maybe if you're gonna go for a walk, go to a different park, somewhere that you've not been to, change up your walking route, or change up where you sit in your home. Something simple like that. Just change up where you sit in your home. These are ways that you can just interrupt the patterns and the routines and create space within your mind to experience things in a new and fresh way. That's a great way to just gain some different perspective and things. Now, how do we want to step away relationally? You know, if you're finding that you're having the same arguments or conversations that go nowhere with your spouse or your children, or maybe even your parents, then maybe it's time to give yourself some space in those relationships. Now I know that it doesn't necessarily mean I don't mean to be pulling away or just to avoid. But if we're going to keep combating, you know, if we're gonna keep bumping up against these same things, creating a little space might be exactly what you need. It's not a bad thing. It really isn't. Now you can also step away from your routines within those relationships. And that just means changing things up. We hear this if you're married, you've heard this advice before about creating a date night or finding ways to step out of the patterns and the routines of your day-to-day life within that relationship. And that can look up just like changing how you spend your time together, going to different restaurants, changing up your routines can help you see the people in your life from a whole new, whole new angle. Now, what does this look like spiritually? Well, again, I'm saying this over and over, but it's because it's worth repeating, it's creating quiet time with God, journaling, separating from your life so that you have time alone with God. As I talked about, Jesus needed to step away, right, to have quiet time. He stepped away from his routines. But also within that realm of your spiritual path. Maybe, maybe things have gotten a little dry within your spiritual journey. Maybe you've been in routines and you're spiritual, and you need, you're finding it just you could switch things up. That's the beauty of Catholicism, is the the church liturgical year. We have those rhythms, right? We have Advent, we have Lent, which are beautiful ways to interrupt those patterns. But I also want to offer you just a few other things, and and that's even just something as simple as going to new churches, checking, checking out different places to visit, going to different shrines or or areas. You know, we have there's basilicas or shrines, there's to visit those places, it's so it just brings something new, it brings new perspective to your faith, to your experience of God. I notice when I go to other churches too, this is another aspect. When I go to other churches, when we travel, that's one of our favorite things to do is to go to different churches and to see things. It's just so beauty, beautiful to see the beauty in different churches. But what happens is much like I talked about when I came back from vacation. What I also notice is when I come back to my own parish and my own church, I'm much more aware of the architecture and the paintings and the things because I haven't been there in several weeks. Then I start to compare the churches I've been to or the places I've been with my own home parish. I start to notice the stained glass windows that I haven't noticed. Again, because I'm I'm much more aware of them. I haven't seen them. You know, whereas I'm going every single week, sometimes I don't pay attention

Clarity Beats Doing More

SPEAKER_00 19:05

to that. So as you can see, what it really boils down to is just our inability to see what's right in front of us when we get when the same habits and the same patterns. And it's just the importance of interrupting that. Now, in our relationships, that really can just look like taking things for granted, taking the people in our lives for granted, whether that's our spouse, our children, our parents, our siblings. And that's why we can hear, you know, we've heard it saying, absence makes the heart grow fonder. And sometimes it really does take for us to be away from or to separate for a short time, for us to be able to see more clearly how much we need it, how much we enjoy it, or how much we cherish it, or maybe even how much we've been neglecting it. As you can see, there's there's more ways to change your perspective and to see things clearly than just going away for several days. I just gave you some ideas. Ideally, taking yourself and just going away and changing your environment completely is one of the most powerful. But otherwise, if you can't do it, just changing up your routines within your day-to-day life will help you gain new perspective and help you see things differently. For me, that shower, that drawer in the refrigerator, the laundry room, they didn't suddenly become dirty. I just finally had the space to see it. It was it it I wish I wish I could convey how powerful powerful it was for me when I came home. I it was like I just saw, and I'm sure you've had the same experience. I I doubt this is I'm the only one that this has happened to. But that happens, and it's true in every area of our lives in our marriages. They don't just one day become stale or stagnant with our children in our relationships, in our faith. Sometimes the clarity that we're searching for, the answers to the questions or the answers to the prayers that we've been praying, it's not going to come from doing more. They're actually gonna come from stepping back or stepping away from, from changing your environment, mixing up or changing up your routines so that we can clearly see what's been there

Resources And Final Invitation

SPEAKER_00 21:17

all along. If you feel like you've been too close to something to see it clearly, whether it's a relationship, a situation with a child, or even your connection with God, you don't have to figure it out alone. This is exactly the kind of work that we do together. You can find more out about me at www.sharonkcoaching.com. And if you're a mom of adult children, check out my free guide, the five things your adult child needs to hear from you. The link will be in the show notes. And until next time, onward and upward, my friends, to the heights. Thanks so much for listening today. If you have any questions or would like to go deeper into this topic or how it affects you in your own life, you can find me at SharonK. That's Sharon the Letterk Coaching.com. If you've enjoyed listening, please subscribe and leave a review on your favorite platform, and feel free to share with anyone you think might benefit from what you've heard.