FIND THE JOY, roll out the red carpet and welcome the lizards
Thursday, March 2, 2023
Sadness and disappointment dot the landscape – you’ll see them on the sunniest of days, and no matter what you do, bleakness clouds your mind and your vision. Well, maybe not yours, but it does cloud mine.
Joy and excitement can aiso be found daily, not with the eyes, as much as in our memories.
The joy and excitement, the new kind, might show up in small bits every day; some people can take a nugget like an unexpected call or a note that comes in the mail to brighten their day and the day of everyone in the place …
But those moments, and those people, are few.
Most of us muddle along somehow, getting through each trough and mini-crisis and find ourselves on a hill again, with a few of the road ahead, the valley below and far off in the distance – a goal of reaching the top of some difficult to reach peak we can barely make out in the distance.
We discard the negatives – leave them behind, try to forget, try to change – but in the end, disappointment rules the day. Not because we should expect or aim for or expect some blow or disappointment, but because failure to find joy is more common (if we let it be) than seeing joy, and finding some joy within ourselves. It’s easier by far to find the disappointment in anything we examine.
Upbeat and positive people, philosophers, and clergymen will tell you can find something positive in everything you look at. They are great cheerleaders, but I tend to also see them as slightly disconnected from reality.
The reality, mine, in this case, is far sunnier looking ahead – and all the sunny memories our past get obscured in part by clouds that have, I expect, always been there. They loom darkly, like a storm poised to drench our faces and scare us to the point we want to hide in a dark corner of dimly lit basement.
The storm passes, the sun brightens our day again, and life returns to perfect for a while. The stillness of a lizard basking in the sun, motionless, waiting for a tasty bug to come by for a quick tongue-dart to nourish the lizard as it returns to basking in warm sunshine.
Why would the lizard be so content when there are so many bugs to chase?
Because the lizard knows by being still and patient, food will come within range.
Most people in my world (me too) spend so much time and effort chasing opportunities we miss the ones that will come to us. Like the lizard, we need to position ourselves in the right place in favourable conditions (for the lizard, that’s basking atop the rock in a high-traffic path; for those of us who market our services, it’s being open for business, being conspicuously available). There are a ton of tasteless jokes on this metaphor I won’t repeat …
The lesson here, if there is one to take away, is that we make ourselves more available for opportunities if we stop chasing them and instead roll out the carpet of welcome to allow these opportunities to flow into our lives …
Maybe it’s time for a zoo visit to study some lizards, patiently, of course.
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