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This article was written when I was still married. I came across it doing a little spring cleaning. I'm so over the winter and as a proponent to the Law of Attraction and thinking like it's already so, I thought I'd visualize warmer weather, sunny afternoons and late evening thunderstorms… and then it snowed.
Anyway, here's the article:
I lost my crystal punch bowl yesterday. The one handed down from generation to generation and I was very, very upset about the whole thing. I just knew my husband had run off with it or something.
His fault I think that way. Any man who takes his wife's best frying pan and uses it as a shovel to scoop cement out of his wheel barrow when his broke but is to lazy to go to the store and get a new one, ought to be regularly accused and branded a cookware thief for life.
He swore an oath that he had nothing to do with the missing punch bowl and led the inquiry towards the kids, testifying quite emphatically that he had seen them, just moments ago, making mud pies out back and that he might have caught a glimpse of something resembling a frying pan.
The kids pleaded the fifth, but in my opinion were a little eager to go take their showers to wash away the mud that was covering them from head to toe…or was that guilt?
Anyway, to his credit, my husband helped me look for the bowl for nearly an hour, just punishment if he actually were guilty. I was just about to suggest that perhaps we had poltergeist and needed an expensive supernatural house cleansing to see if I could break him, when I felt a tug at my sleeve.
It was my daughter and she was pointing at a crystal punch bowl full of fruit sitting on the kitchen counter asking if that happened to be the bowl I was yelling at Daddy about taking.
Now, two things happened at this point. First, my husband called me an idiot, affectionately of course. Then I began to wonder why neither one of us had been able to find the bowl when it was right beneath our noses. Why had it taken an eight year old to solve the riddle of the missing punch bowl?
I'll mention here that I am not an expert on many of the things I write about, but that I do observe life intently and make summations based on past experiences or on things I have read by people much smarter than I am. I now come to this conclusion.
When my husband and I were looking for the punch bowl, we visualized in our heads what that particular bowl looked like and systematically eliminated anything that did not conform to this picture.
Of course a bowl filled with fruit looks much different than a bowl that is empty so we couldn't find what our mind wasn't looking for. My daughter looked for a crystal punch bowl and had no trouble seeing past the fruit and into what really mattered, the bowl.
She looks at everything this way, including people. Our neighbor is just a man who's skin is a different color than hers, but he eats, sleeps and breathes just like anyone else. She doesn't see what so many others do because her brain has not yet been programmed with the false information that all black people are different than she is in more ways than just the color of their skin.
As I grow older, I catch myself jumping to conclusions based on generalities and stereotyping more often than I'd like to admit. I unfairly judge people based on many generalities, race being only one of them. I hate to acknowledge that fact but the crystal punch bowl is all the proof I need that I don't always see things as they really are but rather my mind sees them based on a lifetime of experiences and societal influence.
I always learn my lessons though, be it from a great philosopher or an eight year old child helping her mom see what's right in front of her. As for my husband and his insensitive comment, I'll take my time finding forgiveness, he still owes me a frying pan.
Five years later, still no frying pan…lost the kitchen sink in the divorce to boot. Oh well, at least I have possession of the lessons learned that fateful day and of all the things I've lost over the years, no one can ever take my wisdom from me and use it as a shovel.
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