A brighter outlook... the power of positive thinking... the law of attraction... seeing things through new eyes...
I keep getting email lectures (probably intended as friendly, inspirational, pick-me-ups, but when the universe is nagging...) about clearing my space and making way for better things. Cleaning your cache, emptying your closet, dispersing the clutter! It all seems so logical. Maybe, but still not so simple. For someone who has always scaled the mountains of chaos to get where she was going- smooth roads seem as foreign as Australia's bar-b shrimp, social justice or world peace.
The best thing about not seeing clearly is that you never really see that two by four right before it smacks you silly and lands you on your ass. You never know what you're going to bump into in the dark- and it kinda makes failure comfortably inevitable. And as you're lying there on your face, in an unidentifiable puddle of who knows what, you find yourself thinking "oh no, not again." You do good, but you never expect it back, and you think this is right. Righteous pain.
My windshield wipers were smudging up my windshield. They're not that old, but I held onto them because that's the easiest thing to do, and they represented something that I didn't want to let go of. So there I was, driving in the rain, unable to see well. It didn't help that my contacts don't fit well, so between the two I might as well have been crawling down the road with my hand hanging out of the door, feeling for the roadside. It was surprising that I hadn't driven into something and hurt myself. The better surprise was when I traded in the ineffective lenses for ones that helped me see. While I was there I noticed wiper blades on an endcap. A quick scan of the neatly attached charts and I knew how to solve yet another problem.
As in overcoming any obstacle, time and patience is what we need. Time to re-train ourselves from the toxic familiar, transitioning to the wonder that waits when we let the light in. I laugh at myself now when I recognize myself standing in this shadow. But I laugh because when I look back, I realize how far I've come- and that is all that is important.
When I checked out and paid for the wipers, several people were making a fuss over the dinnerware that the woman in front of me was buying. It was pretty. As I joined in the merriment of the pretty woman's new plates, I don't think that anyone around me could have realized how beautiful my new wipers were.
One day when good becomes the more familiar sensation, you realize that life is not a crapshoot. It's only crappy if you're not shooting for the good.
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