“We think in generalities, but we live in detail.” Alfred North Whitehead.
Everybody thinks; some of us just do it more than
others. One of the things people are
encouraged to think about is what they want from life. According to many psychologists, one of the
ways to achieve our goals is to visualize them - imagine ourselves doing the
things we want to do or being in the places we want to be.
I visualize these things every day. I daydream about the alternate versions of my
life and imagine ways I could change the toxic pieces which hamper my
happiness. Many years ago, I started
using my refrigerator as Ground Zero for my visualizations. Whenever I found a picture of Tuscany or
California beaches or resorts in Thailand or even just of beautiful flowers, I
taped them to my refrigerator.
Inspirational quotes about change and happiness made an appearance
too. Words have power, right? The right phrase is a motivational tool, yes?
No.
Yesterday, I accidentally ripped one of them, so I took it
off. But as the whole surface of the
refrigerator was basically a collage, others causally ripped too. Then I noticed that not only were the
pictures frayed, they were dirty – and
underneath the pictures, the fridge itself was pretty dirty, because (and this
part is what killed me) some of those pictures have been taped to my
refrigerator for like five years. No
exaggeration. And I haven’t been to any
of those places. And I am not inspired
by those sayings. They actually kind of
make me feel bad about myself, because I can’t do those things.
So I ripped them all off.
And then I spent an hour or more scrubbing the outside of the
refrigerator to clean off the gunk. I
had to take a razor blade to scrape off the tape, because it had been there so
long. It was probably a little manic of
me to tear it all off and attack it with a razor, but at what point do we just
forget the dreams and succumb to the mundane elements of life? As it turns out, dreaming about things just
makes me sad. So now my fridge is clean,
and I can see the surface for the first time in several years. I like it better this way. While it may have had character (I don’t
know; it might have just looked tacky), it certainly wasn’t changing my life or
anything. I like the starkness of it now;
it’s not pretending to be something it isn’t, which is a lesson I need to learn
for myself.
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