(Written in September, 2004)
This week is showing signs of being long and difficult. Following the old adage, "when it rains, it pours," I will be dealing with plumbing problems, taking my car to the body shop to fix the damage from someone backing into it, juggling massage clients and preparation tasks for my massage center's Open House on Friday, writing assignments due for both my business and my e-zine (some of them were begun on my laptop, which I left at my sister's house 60 miles away), and of course my busy day job.
Whenever the going gets tough like this, I try to remember what Holocaust author Elie Wiesel once said in an interview. After experiencing the horrors of concentration camps, he subtly reminded people (and this is not an exact quote, but close), "The things you consider to be problems are just mere inconveniences." Not to discount the hardships people go through, but from that perspective, he's right.
I sat in a traffic jam the other night for an hour. After an entire CD played through and I was beginning to grow claustrophobic and homicidal, I took a deep breath and tried the old Catholic trick of "offering it up." I began to think of people who had it far worse than me at that moment. At least I wasn't living in a barracks in Iraq wondering if I was going to be blown up by resistance groups at any moment. At least I wasn't going to bed hungry that night in some rat-infested tenement home—or worse, under a bridge because I’d just been evicted from one. I wasn't living in a war-torn, oppressed country, and would be able to go vote for a president this fall. At least I had a car, and didn't have to stand at bus stops for hours trying to plan my day according to Metro schedules.
Somehow, life wasn't so bad after all.
The morning sun is shining, the sky is a deep blue, my favorite season of autumn is beginning this week, and the plumbers are almost here. Life isn't so bad, really....all I have to do is breathe and keep moving forward.
No comments:
Post a Comment