Greetings!
A few months ago we had a water leak which brought down the
ceiling in the room below. It was disastrous, and I’m so glad it
happened. Let me explain. Have you noticed how its possible,
with the eyes of hindsight, to view an event from a totally
different perspective than the way you originally saw it?
A person devastated by redundancy, for example, may later
come to realize that they were more than ready for a career
change, only they hadn’t quite admitted it to themselves, or
were simply too afraid to take the leap. Similarly, someone
who feels they cannot survive without a certain person or
relationship may yet discover, after going through the pain of
loss and separation, that they possess a certain resilience
which they never knew they had.
Disease, it seems, has the same double-edged nature. When
we get sick, most of us just want it to go away so we can get
‘back to normal’. What is hard to imagine is that by going
through this period of suffering, something beneficial will
come out of it, which perhaps couldn’t be gained in any other
way. Even (or especially) a brush with death can provide us
with a unique opportunity for growth and new life.
The genius hypnotherapist Milton Erickson was left disabled as
a result of a severe bout of polio earlier in his life. He spent
years building up his strength and muscular ability little by
little, which he subsequently realized gave him an
extraordinary awareness of fine motor movements. This
became one of his most useful therapeutic tools, enabling him
to notice how people communicate non-verbally by moving
certain muscle groups. He was also completely tone-deaf,
which gave him the added advantage (as he saw it) of being
less distracted by the content of what people said and
more able to discern the unconscious patterns revealed in the
way that people spoke.
Could it be that what looks like a cause for depression and
despair has the seed within it of something valuable, and not
just some random thing, but a specific quality that we need to
bring forth in our lives at the time? It just might be. Larry
Ellison, the billionaire founder of the Oracle software company
said in an interview that he ‘had all of the disadvantages
necessary for success.’ Which is not a bad way of putting it.
The problem, of course, is that hindsight is not the same as
foresight, and the time when we most need to remember is the
very time we are most prone to forget. Carl Jung had a nice
formula for keeping his mind open to unseen possibilities:
'the gold is in the dark'. Which is what drifted into my
mind when the builders finally came around to replace the
ceiling......
The room in question contained all of the books, tapes and CDs
that I sell by mail order. Months ago, I had decided it was time
to free up the space and find a distributor who could take care
of the products on my behalf. Of course, I never got around to
it. Only now I was literally forced to move all of the
products out of this room, and put them somewhere else. By
the time I had filled up just about every free inch of space in
the house, I began to get the joke..... 'be aware of what you
ask for', these boxes seemed to be saying.
The day that it dawned on me that I had got exactly what I
wanted - to free up this room and move the goods somewhere
else - I learned that my friends at Healthlines in Cumbria had
just moved into a bigger premises and were looking to expand
their mail order business. I got in touch, an agreement was
reached, and I am in the process of transferring the stocks.
Which leaves me with a tantalizing thought. If I had acted on
my earlier decision to clear out this room and find a distributor,
would that leak never have happened? It makes you
wonder......
