Intuition in a Fortune Cookie

I recently received a fortune cookie that said: “Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the goal.” How true that is that our focus has the ability to surmount those “obstacles” which may appear as large as a puddle or as small as an ocean.  Perspective and our own mindset play a distinct role in what and how we perceive an obstacle.

Obstacle is defined as “a thing that blocks one’s way or prevents or hinders progress.”  There are a lot of other words for obstacle that included snag, catch, drawback, hitch, handicap, deterrent, complication, difficulty, problem, disadvantage to name a few.  These seem to be, well, depressing or weighty.  What I’m interested in is how one person’s “snag” can be another person’s “complication”.  According to PowerThesaurus.org, there are 597 synonyms for obstacles; however, there are only 163 antonyms for the word obstacle.  This means that for each “advantage” there are approximately four “disadvantages”.  Does this mean that we focus more on the obstacles than the assets?  And, if you are focusing on the incentives, is there a greater probability you’ll run across more walls?  Knowing society’s prevalence of focusing on a “complication” over “well being”, we can better recognize when we may need to “buckle down” to better manage how we weather our own personal storms and focus on the possibilities of the unknown and not of the hurdles directly in front of us.  Remember, we can always go to Home Depot to purchase a ladder to crawl over the wall of obstacles.