How to Move Mountains

This is the view from my house in the foothills of the Italian Alps.

That beautiful mountain on the right is a constant source of delight. It also blocks the signal from the local Internet transmitter to my house.

After years of experimentation with various internet providers, we were told that the only options to improve our 2Mbs Internet signal would be to move the house or move the beautiful mountain 10m to the left.

I work online, so having to cancel meetings or projects when the rain started was less than ideal and often (in the next valley lies San Pellegrino -we export water to the World!) until one day, drum roll…our Internet company found a satellite solution which propelled our 2Mbs to the roaring twenties!

All was well until November last year, when the start of renewed lockdown restrictions coincided with the disappearance of my Internet signal.

So began a routine of calling the Internet company from my car most mornings, listening to a jolly jingle for a few minutes before chatting to an equally jolly operator who assured me that the problem would be resolved ‘domani’. Let me just make clear that here in the north of Italy, ‘domani’ really does mean ‘tomorrow’.

Tomorrow came and went, and nothing happened. This procedure of ‘go to car, drive a few hundred metres, call Internet provider, be assured of immediate resolution of problem, wait, nothing’ continued without change for weeks.

?I was baffled. My mind chatter went into overdrive. "The company used to send a technician the same day. Of course, there are lockdown restrictions and delays. Have the bills been paid? Has the signal from the station moved slightly?"

By mid-December, heavy snows had arrived, so perhaps the weather was contributing to the problem. I experimented with alternative modems and different cables and checked connections, but to no avail.?????What was going on?

December 24th was a low point. I remember sitting in my car among the snowdrifts, the car engine running to combat the -13C outside temperature, and pleading with the helpline operator to tell me what I had to do to get reconnected, as tomorrow was Christmas, and I would be in isolation without a telephone or Internet connection to contact family and friends. This, I believed, was my trump card. The kind operator sympathised and assured me that there was a strong signal beaming out to my village, and that I would be back online by the end of the day.

I was not.

Christmas Day was spent in front of the wood burner, watching the snow fall on the mountain; the beautiful, yet insurmountable mountain I was convinced was creating this experience.

Fast forward to late January. I had become a fixture at the side of the road in my car each morning as I persisted in my attempts to get back online. Neighbours knocked on the windscreen and shot a cheery wave. Lockdown restrictions were slowly easing, but we still were not permitted to meet up. When I was about to give up and just hibernate until Spring, an engineer called from the Internet provider to say he would be arriving that day! When he arrived,?he was shocked to hear that I had been without Internet for well over two months, and quickly got to the bottom of the “problem”.

Now, from another perspective, we could piece together the sequence of events, which went like this:

In November, the council had drilled a channel into the rock, adjacent to the house. This had shaken and broken the satellite innards without causing any visible damage. A quick call to order a replacement and I was back online!

The mountain had nothing to do with my problem. I had created it , and when I was able to see how I had created it, the solution was easy to implement.

The operators were not to blame, and I only required the magic words “antenna esterna FWA” to get through to the right department – this had been available to me all along!

Until we see that we are responsible for all of it, we are unconsciously creating the circumstances that show up in our lives, and blaming something outside of us.

As Carl Jung put it, “Until we make the unconscious conscious, it will direct our lives and we will call it fate.”

To what or whom have you given away your power?

?I gave away my power to a mountain, for goodness sake!

What do you want to have, do or be? Your dream job at any age, the perfect partner, exciting new opportunities?

You can have it. It is Law.

And all you have to do is choose it!

Want to know more? Message me here or schedule a chat on my Calendly link in my profile.