Have you ever felt like you're living your life in static? The kind that feels like you've been sucked into a television from the 1980's. The kind with the turn dial, where you actually have to get up off of the couch and change the channel! When I was a little girl I'd get up early on a Saturday morning, so I could be first in line to pick what cartoon we watched on TV. It was the only way to compete among 6 siblings. I'd sit and stare at the static waiting for the programming to start so I could be the closest and be in charge of at least one cartoon that I watched that day. I'd watch the black and white static jump across the screen and then start to blip as it moved into action. "Blip, blip, blip" the monotone colors would move up the screen. Suddenly things would go black and then "BAM" color. The program would start and I knew I'd achieved my goal. No one else was up yet, and so I had full reign of the TV.
Lately my life has been stuck in that static mode. Strange sounds, hazy thoughts and a shocking lack of action on my part. The "blip, blip, blip" of my life has just kind of blurred everything around me. The static wasn't that apparent to me until I tried to finally come out of the haze of my recent divorce. I wondered if life was really moving forward or was it backwards in some respects. Or was it really just that moment right before everything went black and then you weren't quite sure what would happen next. What would come next? Would I like what I would see? How long would my life pause in that flash of darkness before the light? What kinds of colors would dance across my life after it was finally over? Could I appreciate them, or would I just long to go back to the "blip, blip, blip" of a simpler and more monotone time of life.
It's painful to come back from something that's thrown you into that blip mode. The anticipation of getting past it is wonderful, but scary. It's nice to know that in time life can heal you from the things you go through, but there's nothing quite like just staring at the screen and waiting, hoping, for some higher power to have a change come into your life. It doesn't always happen though, sometimes we have to get up and change the channel to fix what we are viewing to pick what we really want to see and partake of in life. It isn't always someone else's job to teach us to seize a better life. No one else can fully remove the pain, because without the pain, what would we learn? And so as we suffer as we change and seek out joy, joy takes on a new face and is brighter and more peaceful than we could have ever imagined. But we can't ever find it until we get beyond the blip.
