April 30, 2021
Here we are! But where’s the dot on the map? You know! The part of the story that clearly tells us where time has delivered us. This point to that point. As a daily writer, these words are my photographs. Which I’m horrified to go back and read. Not that the journey has been reckless, out of tune or bent in ways that reshape the statue. Mentally speaking. Your past 60 weeks are very much a mile marker in the heart. To study your photographs or my writing with all its vibrant truths will keep each of us out here on the desert. I’m on the front lines every day. I see you walking, struggling and trying to piece whatever’s left back together. Let’s break this down. How often do you get caught up in a conversation that you think is a connection but in reality your heart and soul are elsewhere? No matter how strong the relationship is, there’s something spinning around in your head that keeps coming up every time you get with this person. That’s how I feel about writing! That’s how you react to the photographs stuffed in the memory banks of that smart phone. We’ve all experienced more than a pandemic. We’re overloaded with memories, questions, failures, new challenges and whatever else we allow to easily slip inside. Here’s the challenge. Leave it off the page. Don’t go anywhere near it. The only sunset photos we keep are the good ones. The same isn’t true about the way we think and hoard experiences. Leave it off the page. We are here. In the present. Right now. What’s running through your thinker? Leave it off the page. You’ll see how a single bad day or moment truly doesn’t need your reasons for wanting to hold onto things. When I first started my walk through a grocery store life I hated putting things back on the shelf. I couldn’t find where they were supposed to go. Every day I spent too much time wandering the aisles trying to figure out why packages of tuna are in the canned meat lane. I became instantly angry with myself and I held it out there for a passerby to feel when they’d reach out and put a loaf of bread inside the potato chips. Nearly a year later I call it Easter egg hunting. I turned a horrid negative caused by other people’s laziness into a game, an adventure, a quest to be a leader. I took my early bad experiences off the page. Last night a guest decided at the last moment that they no longer needed the $228 worth of groceries in the basket. They left. Do you know what $228’s worth of groceries looks like? Because I’ve been present with turning a negative into a positive, it took less than 25 minutes to put everything back. I kept the past off the page. There are many things in your life that can be compared to this experience and for hours you’ll stew over something that was just a moment. Don’t make me say it! Leave it off the page.