Shopping Blues Redux

I was walking through the house today, taking a short break from my work to put in a load of laundry when I had a huge revelation. When I wrote about my shopping experience on Saturday and losing my credit card, I tried to accurately report the truth about the story, mentioning about every little thing that went wrong but showing that I kept my perspective about it. I was glib about the details of what went wrong, and didn't pay nearly as much attention to the things that went RIGHT.

I have to laugh at myself. Ooooppps, I did it again seems the appropriate response.

Many years ago, I realized that I wasn't telling the correct life story any more. The old story, the way I used to talk about my life, was all wrong. It was true, but it was the story that went like this: "I had this disaster, but I learned this from it. I tried something new, it failed, but it lead me to this other thing. " It was as if I was staking out the property line of my life with fenceposts at each disaster, stringing barbed wire between them. I was reliving my life as a story of disasters I had survived.

The truth was really quite different. Yep, I had some disasters, and I did learn from them. But no where in my story were some of the most important decisions of my life. Didn't those events, events not linked to surviving a disaster define me as well? So why wasn't I including them in my story?

And here is what really got me... the disaster survival story just describes how I've reacted to things that have appeared in my life. They are not the story of the things I chose for myself, the times in my life that I just decided to change direction because I wanted to, because I was taking responsibility for my life, listening to my heart, and following my dream. I wanted to reinforce the story of a woman who processes events and feelings, who makes decisions or has gut reactions, and TAKES ACTION ON THEM. Isn't that truly who I am, the actions I choose to take when I have plenty of options available to me, instead of my reactions to things that happened to me?

Of course, both types of events make up who I am, but I had been completely ignoring one set of fenceposts and depending entirely on the other. When I went backward in my autobiography, I found new fenceposts all over the place. And this time, instead of linking them with barbed wire, I imagined them as a split rail fence, solid but accessible and lacking the sharp points that exist only to inflict cuts.

Perhaps later I'll actually rewrite the adventure of my Saturday using the other fenceposts, or perhaps, I'll just smile that I've been reminded to stay focused on the positive things, the evidence of abundance in my life, the events that show me the overflowing well-being in the universe with the same glibness I used to reserve for narrating the less than positive and the near misses.