While turning onto a quiet side street on one of our regular weekend walks, my husband and I came upon two cars blocking the way, each driver standing outside, silently taking the other’s information.
I looked at one car with both its windows covered and said, “No wonder that guy had an accident. His entire side view is being blocked by all that white gear he’s transporting.”
“Those are the deployed airbags,” Donald replied.
Oh.
In the absence of information, I had to make up a story with what I knew, and I’d never seen side airbags in full bloom.
Wisdom comes just like this sometimes.
New understanding filters into our consciousness, offering us a fresh awareness of a familiar experience, and when we integrate this perspective, we can see more clearly.
And we become freer than before our new understanding.
We can take this small experience, for example, and turn it into a learning metaphor about life, without even planning it.
Or knowing that it would show up in this way.
How can we ever plan or know what will happen when we simply live our life and do what we do?
That’s how infinite and playful our creativity is.
It will make connections and come up with something you would never have dreamed up.
When you make space for it.
And listen.
Become intimate and close to it.
And mold it into some form of expression, just for the pure pleasure of it.
Luckily for us, we are not automatons, though sometimes we drain the life juice from our veins with busyness.
Therefore, when we pay close, intimate attention even to so-called minor experiences, we deepen our connection with every part of our lives and by doing so, we find our unique voice.
Then, when you shine your light on it and give it space to tell you its own story, an event on a side street may bring you new understanding.
Take this seemingly innocent event.
The weather got so hot last week, that I needed lighter clothes, and I tried on the one sleeveless dress that was hanging in the closet, not packed with last year’s summer clothes.
I ended up writing this:
The dress I wore last year
to my mother’s funeral
fits loosely now.
Small consolation.
Because I paused long enough to engage with that moment, to listen to what it had to say to me, the small event became a deeper experience, and the words popped into my head before I could reach for a pen.
The memory of the funeral held in 100 degree heat not even a year ago, brought itself back to me because I needed a sleeveless dress that day.
The memory of my precious mother came to join me in a four line poem.
What an exquisite gift.
And you?
When you give yourself even 15 minutes at the blank sheet, inviting those shy ideas and images out to speak to you, you morph into the writing, drawing, dancing, cooking or listening.
Suddenly, you feel as refreshed and delighted by this inner conversation as you would be from discovering that the closed peony in the neighbour’s front yard has miraculously blossomed overnight, and she is a perfect expression of herself.
That exact peony, perfectly unique, is just like you playing on the vast canvas of today.
Any thought of good or bad would be disrespectful to the peony.
Knowing that, you simply let yourself discover what your heart has to say.
And trust it.
What in your life longs for you to look at it more closely?
Ask.
Until you know.
What do you hear?
Now, do you see a possibility for yourself to create from that?
If not, send me a note in the form at the bottom of the connect page and I will reply.