You awake, gulp your morning coffee, brush your teeth and get in the car. You drive nearly three-quarters of an hour, arriving at the door of your doctor’s office within the requested fifteen-minute cushion ahead of your appointment. You dutifully stop at the registration counter and are greeted with a relatively friendly face which, after hearing you speak your name, twists into a puzzled and unhappy look. Your appointment, you are told, is not until the following week. You were mixed up, out of whack with your schedule. Sigh.
Maybe you’ve not experienced that just yet in life. Maybe you are better acquainted with awaking, arising, bumbling down the stairs, and nearly stepping in what the cat threw up at some hour of the night. Before you can get your morning coffee brewing, your cell phone rings, and it is an elderly neighbor desperate for a neighborly hand to help with rebooting the router so that life may go on in her world. You silently swear, grab the keys, and head toward the door where the second helping of what the cat threw up rests. Catching your sleeve on the doorknob, you now curse out loud and stomp toward the car in hopes of winning the Good Samaritan award in somebody’s book by heading to your neighbor’s house anyway. It is then that you realize you grabbed the keys to the condo in the mountains and not the car. By now, any hint of optimism has evaporated and an official case of grouchy has moved in. You are out of sorts, off kilter and all before nine in the morning. Sigh.
Well, perhaps you’ve not yet experienced such a crummy beginning to a perfectly good and unused day. But it’s likely that you have some sense of what it is to feel out of whack. Something’s just a little bit off. You can’t think clearly. You aren’t responding well to what comes up. You don’t see the forest or the trees much less the path through it all. You miss any good that could be because the mess is all you see. Sigh.
Sometimes we may feel that we are traveling through life in a vehicle that’s rolling on wheels out of alignment. We’re certainly not alone in feeling this way. The news from all over the world bears witness that the whole planet is a bit atilt. Even “Mother Nature” seems to be pitching fits because in her view much in the world is awry. There's no Band-Aid big enough. No quick fix effective enough. The opportunities are plentiful for making adjustments, for making amends, for making things line up in more workable ways. So, will we utilize perception, nurture patience, and cultivate perseverance in order to lean into life for all?
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