The relationship with my wife Kathy had an inauspicious beginning. For those who know me well, however, it was befitting the tenor of our relationship. On our first date, Kathy and I drove from Bakersfield to Los Angeles to look at Christmas lights. Our self-guided tour led us to the town of Altadena, near Pasadena, to the Balian House. The Balian estate, owned by the founders of the Balian Ice Cream Company, occupies 3.5 acres of land in a fashionable old urban neighborhood. Each year the family bedecks their home with an impressive, albeit rather garish, holiday display that includes some 10,000 colored lights. Every night of the season holiday pilgrims park their cars on neighboring streets and negotiate the dark streets toward the luminescent mansion. Kathy and I parked and joined the throng. As we walked, I took a step, slid, and lost my footing. My feet, compliantly followed by my legs, flew shoulder-height into the air. Somehow--I was much younger then, though not much smaller--I landed on my feet. Recovering my breath, I looked behind me to find what might be responsible for my skid.
In the light of a passing automobile I discovered a banana, partially consumed, its remnant fruit upright in the roadway, its empty peel parted and pointed in the four directions of the compass. It looked like an exotic Latin chiquitita bowed in mocking curtsy in my direction. Straight out of a Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoon. It was on that first date, by the way, that I discovered my future wife's tendency toward schadenfreude.
So, there has to be a point to this story, other than shared humiliation.
We can find ourselves slipping on emotional and spiritual banana peels--anger, rejection, jealousy, resentment, injustice--and unable to recover our balance. We may become attached to these negative emotions; we may even give them permission to define our identities. We subsequently become, as author Henri Nouwen termed, the "offended one," the "forgotten one," the "discarded one." There is value in investigating, illuminating, these dark spaces--to discover and to diffuse them of their power; however, there comes a time to step over them and to move beyond them, though the circumstances that resulted in these negative emotions may remain unresolved. At the risk of sounding trite, where's the banana peel in your life?
How has it come to define you?
What's the "reason behind the reason" for its power over you?
What would it take to move beyond it, to diminish its power?
Who do you need to forgive? How has withholding forgiveness proved beneficial to you? Contemplate the following statement: "Resentment does more harm to that in which it is stored, than to that upon which it is poured." |
