Leopards and Lightening Sand

When I started this blog, I vowed to make it a happy little place and for the most part, I’ve stood by that commitment. I did say that sooner or later, this little-engine-that-could would inevitably jump the tracks and get stuck in the mud or lost in the tall weeds. I promised myself that I would not stay stuck long (my mom says pity parties have a shelf life of about 24 hours before they get annoying to those around us) and that I would try to find something useful in the midst of the muck.

Lately, I’ve heard a lot of people saying they were disappointed in this or that. Truth be told, I might actually be one of those people. My weekend went as far off the rails as I could imagine and I had more than a few opportunities for disappointment. By Monday morning, to be honest, I was stuck in a quagmire of disappointment and couldn’t quite figure out how to get out. I felt like Princess Buttercup in The Princess Bride when she fell into the lightening sand in the fire swamp and disappeared. I needed a Westley to grab a vine, dive in, and rescue me. Sadly, there was no Westley in sight so I was on my own to save myself.

Monday night, I did what I do when I’m stressed or my feelings are hurt. I donned my boxing gloves and pounded out what felt like 100 rounds on the punching bag in my garage. I got temporarily lost in the rhythm of the jab, cross, hook, uppercut but when my arms turned to jell-o and the gloves suddenly seemed to have gained about twenty pounds, I quit, feeling no closer to my normal state of bliss than when I’d started.

I then ruined all that frenzied exercise by spending some time with a spoon and a bucket of butter pecan. That didn’t do much except give me a belly ache. If Ben & Jerry can’t fix it, it’s time to officially declare it a crisis and take drastic measures.

I pulled out my go-to guide for emotional balance, a handy dandy book I picked up years ago but that now has more highlights and ink marks than original type. Iyanla Vanzant’s One Day My Soul Opened Up. In the matter of disappointment, Iyanla says this:

           

“The only thing people can do is what they can do. They may say they can do something else. They may want to do something else. We go along, believing what they say even when their track record tells us otherwise. In the end, we say they disappointed us. No. We are disappointed that we put our faith in this person despite our better judgment. People will always show you who they are.”

Oh, thank you, Iyanla, how right you are! I’ve heard Oprah say that too, “People will always show you who they are. You should listen the first time.” Smart ladies, Iyanla and Oprah! I believe, like me, they’ve doled out a few too many second chances in their days to have learned this lesson and to be able to speak to it with such authority.

As I looked back over the downfalls of my weekend, I realized that 1. The object of my disappointment had done exactly what their nature dictated and 2. I was really more annoyed with myself for choosing to believe what I knew all along was not true, accurate, or even possible.

It’s sort of like the saying, “A leopard can’t change his spots.” You can’t fault a leopard for doing what leopards do; they don’t mean anything by it, they’re just doing what they were created to do. You also can’t blame a leopard for not being born a zebra; it wasn’t meant to be anything but a leopard and it’s not anyone's fault.

According to Iyanla, the cure for disappointment is to forgive yourself for choosing not to clearly see the information that was right in front of you. Given that I like me (I’ve said more than once ‘If I weren’t me, I’d be friends with me.’), forgiving myself is well within my range and something I'm more than willing to do. I picked myself up, brushed myself off, apologized to Ben & Jerry for scarfing and not savoring their morsels of frozen delight, and made a new commitment to myself to keep my arms, legs, and especially my heart inside the train at all times, especially when the tracks wander into those tall weed territories where the leopards (and other “wild animals”) like to hide. And, if anyone sees a Westley, send him my way; there's bound to be more lightening sand around here somewhere...