“Get up, shake it off, start again tomorrow.” I can still hear my brother’s 8-year-old voice in my head, convincing me to pick up my bicycle after my 6-year-old self crashed it for the hundredth time, refusing to ever ride it again. Truth be told, he was likely the cause of that crash and just tried to keep me from getting him into trouble for it. Despite the cause, the advice stuck with me, and as a 28-year-old, it still rings ironically true. It’s all we can do. We don’t have many “do-overs” in life. In fact, we get none. We can control our action and reaction to anything, but beyond that? We’re subject to the current, whichever way it leads, boat-thrashing, will-breaking and all.
Margaret Feinberg once said that she looks for the “ping” when constructing a platform for her writing…a connection between people, places, and ideas. Life often hands them to us and we can choose to hear it or we can pass it by, unnoticed and untouched by it. It’s all in the details.
Here’s an example. She had a friend who suffered a terrible divorce and changed her name when it was all said and done. She changed her first name as well as her last name and later addressed how the name and meaning behind it was powerful and meaningful for her.
A few months later, she was in a dialogue with a friend who rescues dogs. Margaret learned that when a new dog is adopted, the dog gets a new name. This seems confusing, but the reason behind it is because dogs who have suffered abuse will often connect that treatment with their name. Ping.
I understand that more now.
I think it can be easy to focus so intently on the details that add up to anything good or bad that happens in our lives, and we spend so much energy and attention on the impact of those details that we forget the scope of the actual events taking place.
For example, last week, I successfully (and accidentally) dropped a set of keys down a 19th floor trash chute, raked through the trash with a kind (but slightly obnoxious) security guard, while avoiding glass bottles and metal saws (<–not kidding) that were thrown down the chute as we searched. I never found the keys. I did drive an hour the next day to retrieve a spare for the set, and then I was involved in a car accident. But this is life, right? These unexpected adventures that may not always make the highlights of our month or year.
I don’t want to be that person. The one who looks at the weight of the details as holding individual hands tied around my neck. I can laugh about it now, the irony in the inconvenience of it all. I don’t know that anyone’s lives turn out exactly like they think it will. Sometimes it’s a relief to find out that you were wrong, or it’s a surprise to learn what you’re capable of, and what could be waiting just around the river bend (thanks Pocahontas).
Be grateful for everything you are, everywhere you have been, and the person you are becoming, despite the details that brought you here or nearly prevented it. Sometimes it’s hard to be proud of yourself. The journey isn’t always easy or even pretty, and I wish we could choose the people to unburden it for us, but then we would never really know what we are made of. I am thanking God tonight for showing me what it means to break your own will for the right reasons. I’m eternally thankful for the people who recognized those pieces of me and worked endlessly to put them back where they belonged.
M
Blue Withens 