A cosmic reminder

The world is your exercise-book, the pages on which you do your sums.
It is not reality, although you can express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write nonsense, or lies, or to tear the pages.
Richard Bach- Illusions


“In the world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
Oscar Wilde


Sitting on my front porch on a perfect Chicago evening drinking Sangria and enjoying an amazing breeze. Earlier today I celebrated with our hockey team and 2 million other people, and then hung out with some musicians at our blues fest who were some of the best who ever lived. It truly was a spectacular day. Do I say this to gloat? To remind everyone of the life of leisure I live? Not really. Well, maybe a little.

The truth is, this has been one of the most stressful weeks I can recall. Without going into detail, I had a professional crisis that threatened to undermine everything I’ve spent the last decade or so working on. It was scary as well as quite humbling.

I bring up these two small vignettes from my life because they have reminded me of an important lesson that I constantly need reminding of. All of this life, all of these things we worry and sweat and grieve about, we, for better or for worse, helped put them into our lives. That is, I’m convinced, the hardest human pill to swallow, but if we can truly grasp this idea, really take it into our hearts, we are free to create an entirely new universe anytime we choose.

I have used this kind of reasoning with my clients many times, and I am often met with a chorus of protests. What about my kids and my bills, and my asshole husband, and on and on and on. This brings me back to my own life and the stories I was alluding to. 48 hours separated these two experiences, yet I allowed my reality to shift from utter catastrophe to the complete other side of the dial towards pure joy. I’ve always been a creature of extremes, while also striving towards what the Buddha called the “middle path.”

You know what was funny about my day of “pure joy” though? Every little thing went wrong. I dropped my toothbrush and it fell right on the bristle side. I banged my knee on a coffee table while trying to answer the door. My gorgeous Fred Flinstone-size turkey leg fell right out of my hand onto my pristine white shirt.

What was different? How I chose to respond to all of these things, and in this case it was with a great deal of laughter. As a very odd man used to say to me, sometimes you’re the pigeon and sometimes you’re the statue, and today I was a very appreciative statue. For all of the wrong turns and sharp corners the world threw at me today, I just had to laugh. It was like a cosmic reminder that, yes, you are going to have a spectacular day today, but here is a little bang on the elbow so you can remember that sometimes it goes the other way too. A little middle path reminder that I was much in need of.

The takeaway I hope is that it isn’t the events that happen to us, but rather the way we chose to think about them. Comedy is tragedy plus time, but it is up to us to decide if we are going to dwell on the little tragedies in our lives for a couple of seconds or a couple of years. All of this is just a very small slice of a much larger reality that cares very little for our petty grievances, and make no mistake, they are petty. We can chose a thousand different paths in this life, but ultimately what we leave behind in our lives is the way we made people feel, and personally I want to be remembered as someone who laughed well and laughed often.