Thursday, November 27, 2008

If you don't like a thing ...

... change the way you look at it. I don't know where or when I first heard that (it seems like it's from one of those female empowerment movies like Steele Magnolias) but it's one of those truisms that I picked up along the way and stored away somewhere in my brain but don't exactly live by on a regular basis.

I was reminded of it this morning, Thanksgiving morning 2008, when, on a rainy, wet, grey morning I looked out my kitchen window and saw this:


A rainbow. This is the same front window from which I can see the hacked up tree that I blogged about a few days ago. Same window, different day, different view. Instead of seeing a hacked up tree instead I see the rainbow. It seems like that's a metaphor for more than just trees and neighbors.

In some ways this also conversely proves what I wrote about the Santa Anas ... out of a gloomy, grey, rainy day comes something so beautiful, one of Mother Nature's many miracles: a rainbow.

So often I focus on the minor irritations and minutia of my life, but things are changing all the time. From one minute to the next, maybe if we looked at the same thing just a little differently we'd see something else. Feel something else even. Maybe if we didn't focus on the minutia, like the chopped off limbs of a tree, we could see the larger world view, the rainbow in the sky.

Perspective matters.

On Thanksgiving people pause and think about the blessings in their lives, the big picture of what really matters. It's not that their view of their life has changed, or that those things that bothered them the day before have gone away, it's that on Thanksgiving they stop and look at things a little differently.

Happy Thanksgiving.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Kate,
Glad I got to see the rainbow. Home tomorrow, dale moves out and my new life begins. Allen misses the firestorm in India by a few days but is in the midst of the closed airport fiasco trying to get to Bali. You are so right, it is ALL about perspective my dear friend. See you soon! patti