Oh how I crave the shift. I want to see my world as all possibilities, untangled with preconceived can’ts. I want to see my children as cherubs and my career as chosen, doable, and successful. To come home to my body and my house and see them for the fabulousness they contain. And each day passes by me as I await the shift.
From the wickedly talented recently deceased (ovarian cancer at my age) memoirist and author Amy Krause Rosenthal via her book Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life,
“RETURNING TO LIFE AFTER BEING DEAD
When I am feeling dreary, annoyed, and generally unimpressed by life, I imagine what it would be like to come back to this world for just a day after having been dead. I imagine how sentimental I would feel about the very things I once found stupid, hateful, or mundane. Oh, there’s a light switch! I haven’t seen a light switch in so long! I didn’t realize how much I missed light switches! Oh! Oh! And look — the stairs up to our front porch are still completely cracked! Hello cracks! Let me get a good look at you. And there’s my neighbor, standing there, fantastically alive, just the same, still punctuating her sentences with “you know what I’m saying?”. Why did that bother me? It’s so… endearing.”
The shift is when you see the ordinary as not so much. Your perspective is skewed enough for you to appreciate the mundane, even if momentarily. And it can allow you to understand yourself and your role in the world a little more. Certainly death causes shift as does vacations. How do we go about causing a perspective change without nearly dying or paying to stay somewhere else? Have you had any perspective shifts? What did they look like?
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2 Comments
Indeed. Being much closer to death; seeing my vigorous, yet 74 year old brother and knowing he is much nearer the end than the beginning. Seeing my 65 year old husband grow old and weary from working so hard each day with no real end in sight. Feeling how quickly my last 40 years have zipped by.
There are two choices when walking a cat -crazy or zen. I counted six little flowering weeds under my feet on the hillside where I sat as Josephine took a sun bath.
Too soon old, too late smart? Maybe. But today I saw a weed-flower half the size of a pencil eraser that looked like an iris.