Little boxes

We really are little boxes.  All stacked up waiting for people to place templates over us and make sure we fill up on the right stuff from the day we are born. Mostly very good people with very good intentions doing the best they know how.

But underneath all those templates are slots. Lots of slots in all different sizes, depths, colors and places and no matter how hard we try to use the templates, our slots sort out what we can use and what we can't and try to fill themselves up.

Growing up and growing older makes the templates either become part of our skeletal structure or it begins to thin allowing the slots a better chance of finding what they need.

It's probably never going to be neat and tidy. All those ducks in a row will surely have a few swans and geese and maybe even a skunk or fox or llama. Whatever the reasons are probably don't really matter because the slots are there and the better they are filled the more fulfilled we are.

As I've grown older I have been surprised at the way things happen. Seldom the way it looks, I have found peace in unlikely places and been miserable in the places that should have been perfect for me.  No one has ever been allowed to make me happy unless I let them. I think because happiness is only a state of mind. It blooms when more of my slots are filled than when they are empty and I don't even have, or need to know the why or how of it. Although when I do realize something, it makes things easier.

Sometimes I wish I could have known this at three, or twenty, or even fifty, but I still had great moments and hours and days and even months of joyfulness. The darkness is a like a Jackson Pollock painting, splattered here and there, sometimes heavy and sometimes almost gone.

My teachers, what some people call guardian angels, or guides, or just best friends, have been here at the most crucial times. In this way I have been blessed.

I wish I could share the process with others, but I don't think it's really possible. We are, each of us, so unique and our environments, even among siblings, even more unique, so that there is no one else in the whole world exactly the same.

The best we can hope for is to follow our way and try to learn from it as we go. The desire to learn is our most valuable asset.