Noticing the bright moments might help
I sit down at my desk this morning and smile at the sunlight filtering through the maple trees and coming in the side window of our office. On the lawn out the window in front of me, there are patterns of shadow and bright grass. The very first time I walked through this house, this is how I imagined it would be. I knew someday I would sit here in the morning light to write. A dream has come true. Life is good.
There have been so many rocky moments along the path to where I am now. Some of the ways to use rooms in this house did not work out the way I pictured them, there have been compromises and letting go. Some of those shifts have worked out for the better. I’m not bitter. I just wonder how I can develop the ability to mellow out at the moments when I realize that I need, even want, to let go of what I had imagined. My hopes are swirled together with the hopes of others and the new design may be interesting or beautiful or tasty like a swirl of ice cream flavors. Or they may blend completely to create a totally new shade, like paint. Do I have to put out my claws and resist so vehemently, like a cat being pushed into a carrier? What might keep my curiosity intact when change is required, when change doesn’t feel like an easy choice?
One of the ways I give my curiosity daily exercise is to take a walk. Walking in the morning turns on my tendency to notice and appreciate. Just today, I saw a driveway with large chalk-marked squares labeled “donate” “toss” “keep” ready for a grand sorting event, flooding me with compassion for relatives who are in the midst of such events. Seeing a robin’s egg shell on the sidewalk, I looked up into the tree above to see if I could spot a nest. The tree was too high and too leafy for a view, but I knew there was a baby bird somewhere. A grey-bearded man wandered with a large, slow dog on a leash while a mom and daughter were hurrying along the sidewalk, saying “perfect timing!” as the school bus roared towards us up the street. The right speed is relative. In one yard, a life-sized statue of a little boy with a baseball cap hunkered down to look at a turtle, reminding me of the joy of wonder.
The magnolia blossom I took a photo of yesterday was already brown this morning. How fleeting some beauty is. A spider web between two stalks of lavender had pulled them into an arch with the top tips touching – a gothic lavender design. Of the high school students with full back packs striding towards the city bus stop, some say good morning in response to my greeting, some avoid my eyes and remain silent. I wonder what is going on in their worlds. Plants are glowing and backlit by the early light: maple seeds forming on the branches in clusters among the bright leaves, and below, a row of rose bushes in full bloom, neatly caged against the wandering deer of the neighborhood. I smile at a long, jagged crack in the sidewalk beautifully filled with morning glories. It’s art. In my garden vegetable beds, I avidly pull out every wild morning glory before it gets a chance to climb and choke the veggie plant. Just outside the beds, I cheer on each wild flower, and thank them for their beauty. There’s the old saying that a weed is just a matter of placement, of whether it’s growing in an invited place or not.
Taking this analogy to my life, I think about the reticular activating system, in which we see what we have chosen to focus on. If I’m thinking about getting a certain breed of dog, now I see them on every outing. If I’m pregnant, suddenly the world seems full of babies. The website Contemporary Psychology states that
“The RAS is a guard point between your senses and what comes through to your awareness. It makes decisions on what stimuli make it through and get processed. Our brain is not always processing every piece of sensory information! This is a survival mechanism because at any given point in time, only some of the information our brain is receiving is relevant.” –https://www.contemporarypsychology.com.au/reticular-activating-system-intention-in-attention/
How do I learn to have that reticular activating system switched on so that I can select where to take my attention when things are not going well? When I feel disappointed, what will remind me to remember all that is fortunate in my life? When I reflect back on my day in the evening can I list the satisfactions?
And if I raise the bar even higher, what can keep me open to possibility, to beyond, “your way versus my way,” to a potential third way, when I feel a conflict?
