It is one thing to watch life on film, and another thing
altogether to live it.
The formulaic experience of being entertained by someone
else’s life goes, every day experiences, trouble, climax, and solution!
My experience is that most things aren’t quite so neatly
accomplished.
I remember watching the clock as a child certain that if I
could survive the tension for another few minutes, the show would end on the
half hour or hour and all would be well.
And while it is nice to have that kind of certainty, it sort of sets one
up to fail at the real thing in some respects.
It takes time to solve most problems and it takes time to
refine the work put into the solutions before they are solidly entrenched in
present lives. Believing that life is
fixed in thirty, sixty or even a hundred twenty minute segments is misleading.
Most things take months or years depending on what they
are. A learned behavior might even take
longer than that to change! Of course
the secret is to take them “one day at a time” or even one minute at a time,
but the knowledge that others found it difficult is not necessarily a bad
thing.
When I watch a montage of someone’s weight loss, or recovery
from addiction, zipping artistically past me it is kind of hard to really imagine
the long nights struggling, or months of patient waiting. Those things don’t make good entertainment
unless portrayed briefly and with the appropriate music.
Today it is possible to supply a sound track for my life,
but I still can’t fast forward through the hard parts. No one wants to hear that it may take as
long, or longer, to fix a problem as it took to create it. But in the long run, honesty is the best
solution.
Otherwise it is too easy to believe I have failed and give
up before I’ve really had a chance to begin.
Honestly….it is the journey that counts. I try to remember that. The faster it goes, the sooner all of it is
over, including the good parts.
No comments:
Post a Comment