After all, the Shamrock is a cheerful reminder of a charming celebration. Finding some several days afterwards keeps me thinking of those good times.
So often the tendancy is for us to remember traumas from our past and allow those to guide our lives. That urges us live defensively.
For example, let's say we go the baseball game. We're having a wonderful time. Our team is winning, we're with people we really like, the hot dogs and beer taste really good, and the weather is perfect. Then, out of the blue, a pop fly hits us in the head. OUCH. The pleasant day is gone in an instant.
We may choose to leave the game, and we might even decide, from that one incident, that we'll never go to a baseball game again. Too dangerous.
In one fell swoop we've discarded all the good things that happened and just looked at that one bad event. We then make a decision about baseball that colors the rest of our life: We'll never go to another game again.
This seems extreme, I know, but people make choices like that everyday. They drag out their unpleasant history and use it as an excuse to eliminate certain activities, actions, even types of people from their lives, as if life events can be exactly reproduced from past to future.
People, even mass-produced fast food hamburgers from the same venue don't all taste exactly alike. Far from it.
An old saying holds true here: "You can't step in the same river twice."
Life is flow. It keeps moving, evolving, and changing, just as we do.
Sure, we can keep creating misery if we go to the ball game again and EXPECT something bad to happen. We might not get hit on the head again, but we'll spill our beer or it'll rain. When we push against what we don't want, we're sure to make more of it.
Why not, if we feel we must use our history to define our future, take out of our memory banks examples of the great things that happened and focus on them. Concentrate on the fun time we had the last time we went, the happy conversations with our friends, the taste of the dogs and beer, the loveliness of the weather. Use that history. Try to recreate that. Sure, we won't get the exact same day again. That day is gone. But we'll get a shiny new one, a day that makes us glad to be alive because we'll be using that magical mind of ours to look for fun instead danger. Seek and ye shall find! Ignore the weeds, find the shamrock!
Now that's the way to live.
Love, Kristine
