Your life like ours is extremely busy. You see this window of opportunity. You make an appointment for yourself, to be with yourself. It’s something you had to do. Part of staying vigilant is knowing when you need to do just that…get away. Getting away and running way are two different things. Many of us chose the path of running away and it didn’t work because we brought ourselves along. And we dropped the ball.
We blamed others for our own inadequacies. The reason I’m like this is because…or the reason I can’t do that is because… LOOK!!! At what THEIR doing to ME!!! It’s all his or her fault!!! Their throwing the ball too hard and too fast. They won’t let me have a turn. They won’t give me the ball. They won’t let me play.
So. What do you do now? Now that you’re with yourself, just you, all alone. Or are you? Or can you even stand being alone with yourself? Play your own game of solitaire? Maybe sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t. But this time you choose to go for it. You close your eyes to meditate and see what happens. Not so much as to tune out but to tune in. Your mind starts to do its own gymnastics. Random thoughts are running rampant. You’re wondering what the hell is going on. All of those memories come flooding in, both good and bad. Even stuff from WHAT? High school? Really?
But you’ve grown up and you’re not the so called “nerd” they called you in school. Just because you loved to read and write poetry.
You weren’t the social butterfly and not athletically inclined enough to make it on any sports teams. Or you could have been the jock who won all sorts of trophies and now you have a wife, three kids and a potbelly so huge that when you look down you can’t see your feet.
Or that homily girl with the big rimmed glasses who was a loner and constantly teased because your parents couldn’t afford to dress you in the latest style clothing like all the other girls.
Or you were a little too social of a butterfly and popular with the boys or girls for all the wrong reasons. Whatever the case. If they can see you now: the CEO, the author, poet, Victoria secret model.
We found out that life threw us a lot of curve balls. Some balls we were able to knock out of the park. We also struck out a lot because the ball was traveling so fast we could not really see it but we swung anyway. If we were lucky enough to hit it sometimes we made it to home plate and sometimes we were just too tired or too dismayed to even run the bases. But if we took our eye off the ball we were guaranteed not to hit it.
The phrase ‘as American as baseball and apple pie’ comes to mind. And some of us realized that we would rather eat apple pie than play baseball. And then we tried the game of golf and the principles were basically the same. Although we weren’t swinging at a moving ball, we still had to keep our eye on the ball until it was it hit. An even deeper reality exists in that we don’t actually hit the ball, the bat or club hits the ball. We just provide the mechanics. So the swing is everything.
Manufactured Misery
So years past and you went on with your life. You were not always as vigilant as you should have been or could have been. There were set backs. On some you recovered and others you never fully recovered. Sometimes you lost your way and had to wander through the forest. You manufactured so much misery in your life and ended up on and assembly line making defective toy soldiers that you couldn’t sell to anyone except yourself. Then you humbly realized that you were the broken one who needed fixing. You found that writing down your feelings helped to heal. You were able to get back up. Back into the ring. YES! You found the therapeutic value in writing. Like a super hero armed with pen and paper you made a commitment to share the love, pain and strength you’ve experienced to help others to heal. You found out that by doing this, you were also helping to heal yourself.
But the BIG BAD WOLF was always lurking, just waiting for any opening, any opportunity to pounce. His disguise always changing making him more difficult to spot. Then you think about all of the stories you read as a child, watching cartoons and the nursery rhymes. They were not written by children but adults who bottled up and packaged their own experiences of love, insecurity, fear, strength, hope and child like imagination into laughter for both learning and entertainment.
Some authors may have also had an ulterior motive to frighten the hell out of us kids. Some of us were afraid to go to sleep at night. But now that we have become adults; we don’t have to be afraid to sleep with the lights off. Well, perhaps most of us…
Keep your eye on the ball while you’re swinging.
STAY VIGILANT. DAY and NIGHT. Watch out for the BOGGY MAN. Watch out for any negative person or thing that could potentially steal your joy and happiness. Keep your eyes OPEN and your mind SHARP. Do your best to GUARD and PROTECT your precious gift. Travel down that yellow brick road of courage and creativity. The DPL is counting on you. We’re with you. You can do it. But it’s up to you to keep your EYE on the BALL.
NOW GET OUT THERE AND HIT IT!!!
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