I ran into a basket pole on the school playground when I was 12 and smashed my glasses. Yet the alarming thing to me was immediately afterwards finding half my front two teeth still stuck to the pole. Ouch. Oh, were my parents going to be upset.
Walking home from school afterwards my mind was in a whirl around how I would broach the topic. Yet all I needed to do was walk in the back door with my glasses on and see the look on mom's face. Then I grinned sheepishly and mom almost fainted. The remaining teeth weren't pretty.
It seems I've often spent my time bumping into the world. That day it was simply because I wanted to practice "catch" before an upcoming softball game, yet knew the field was muddy. So my friend and I tossed and caught on the playground. I forgot where I was when I took off running backwards, watching the overhead lob, and then smashed into the cement pole on the BB court. I guess you could say I was stunnned.
Simply because I let my emotions get a hold of me. I am an "in the moment" responder to life. My spirit soars when I live fully in this way, yet often I bump into the world because I haven't thought things out in advance. After years of being that way, I eventually entered a very adult life with a strategy.
Strategy took me a long time to understand. Today I have learned the need to be objective about facts and perspectives yet balance it with passion around acting on them. It's a constant balancing act for sensitive, people-focused people like me. Yet without this balance, life experiences could lead me to believe that I'm out of focus, even fragmented from all the emotional peaks and valleys.
Today I still bump into the world, but now I look for the bigger picture more often. And if I've forgotten to, I remember to calm down, pick up the pieces and study the lesson. I get a lot of them.
