How perfect the imperfect
Brenda Star
went through five years of recuperation hell after an accident, but
there she was, right in front of me while we were having lunch,
proclaiming it was the best thing to ever happen to her. (More to come
on this in a follow up.)
I’m
sitting in a down-sized home right now — that cost us half what we
sold our previous home for — and am rabidly, contagiously happy. A park
streaming with biking paths — really a slice of old Florida heaven —
lies within a twelve-minute bike ride from our front door. We back up to
a preserve that goes on for miles, and already these miles of preserve
have brought us a coyote, all the winged creatures your eyes can handle,
a wild boar, a rattlesnake too!
I remember when we
had to let go dozens of people in successive waves while I was at Lehman
Brothers many years ago. Though it was devastating at the time to each
person, it was uncanny how often I heard back within months how the
firing had been the catalyst to a better life. People found positions
better suited to their talents and inclinations. People seemed to emerge into more enticing lives . . .
A revelation from within a dream
A friend — who pined for his high school sweetheart who’d left him in the first
year of college — he’d gone on to an unsatisfying marriage — told me
of a realization he’d had in the midst of a dream . . . .
In this dream he
was allowed to go back in time — he could go back in time to high
school if he desired, and he could start living life from right there,
he could be there again, with the loveliest, liveliest woman he’d ever
managed to date, he could live from there and try to get it right, if he
desired. All else that he’d lived would vanish, as if it never were.
In the dream he
was thrown back by the realization he could never go back farther than
when his youngest child was conceived, or else the going back would
obliterate her.
Then he realized
he couldn’t go back at all — or else he’d lose all those so special, so
everyday moments with his children. He’d lose other experiences that
had come to mean so very much to him . . . he couldn’t go back.
That was when the imperfect became perfect for him. As it really is for all of us.
You’ll enjoy these other posts too (plus you get a compelling story arc if you read them in order)