Heal!
You know those old images of televangelists, who hold their hands in the air and say HEAL! really loudly, sometimes knocking someone in the head until they fly backward, or stumble into the aisle? I haven’t been to enough tent revival meetings to know how true this is (or isn’t), but that’s pretty much how I felt today.
No, life didn’t hand me one of those grudgingly learned lessons, or humble me into a new belief. It didn’t ask me to go to an embarrassing mental place in order to grow and change.
For small things, I can be very grateful.
What it did is sneak up on me. It’s been a very busy few months for me, preparing for a book launch, attend a lot of meetings, doing book marketing and even getting ready for a play to be staged and marketed in Baltimore (where I don’t live). In times like these, time is flying by so fast, and you’re forgetting to eat or sleep much, that it’s easy to lose sight of the long-term plans to stay centered and focused.
Today, since things slowed down a bit (my book cracked the top 100 books in all of Amazon, in both the paperback and e-book versions — not bad for the little book that could!). I was sitting at my desk just allowing my mind to drift a little, which feels wildly luxurious these days. I’ve been wanting to start writing on a new project, but my mind didn’t want to go there. So I let it wander.
And it showed me where I’d been this time last year, and then the year before that. It went back three years, then four, and then five. It was moving so quickly, I didn’t have much time to react. All I saw was a kind of backwards time-lapse photography, where I was being shown where I had come from, and where I was now, and how much progress I had made, not just in terms of accomplishments, but of healing. I had left behind old ideas that limited who and what I could become, and old relationships that no longer served me. Part of me had even left behind the idea of having to get anywhere, so much so that just to reach out for something, or the idea of something, got me closer than I have ever been to being the person I’ve always wanted to be.
