There is a house being renovated on a street where I often walk. The ground beneath it has completely been dug out to underpin the foundation and there is a massive excavator in that hole, under the front wall. The whole house looks like it’s floating in the air.
And when I passed it yesterday, I noticed that there is still a holiday wreath on the front door. It made me smile and think about how we’re all kind of like that house. Our foundation has been broken down through years of uncertainty, a global virus, interruptions of jobs, school, milestones, and anything else that was part of ‘normalcy.’ Yet, we soldier on, a wreath on our front door, while our feet stumble to find something solid to stand on. And when we find it, we put one foot in front of the other and keep walking. Our mindset is everything.
I also just finished a book that has now been added to my short list of all-time favourites. The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot by Marianne Cronin. In it she writes, “I thought about a story I once heard. Maybe I didn’t hear it, maybe I read it, but however I came to know about it, it’s a good story. There were two men in the hospital. Both of them were ill. One man was told that his condition was going to improve, that he had a life expectancy of many years and that with time he would recover. The other man was told that he was going to die within a year. One year later, the man whose death had been predicted was dead, and the man who was told he would survive had survived and reported feeling well. It was then that the hospital realized there had been an error and the two men had been given the wrong information, each hearing the other’s fate. The man who passed away had in fact been healthy, and the man who had lived was the one with the fatal illness.”
What does our mind do to us? How does it shape our perspective? What role do our thoughts play in whether we think our life is good, whether we feel we have something to look forward to, and whether we would leave the wreath on the front door when the house is falling apart?
Life is all about the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Choose a story that helps you carry on.