Beth's Ponderings
As I type this, my right knee is currently covered in a massive colourful bruise, and it’s even missing some skin. The reason my knee is in such a sorry state is because almost every time I walked by my bed today - which was a large number of times - I managed to smash my knee very hard onto the sharp wooden corner of the bed’s foot board.
Now, it isn’t like I don’t know it’s there. The bed has been in that particular spot since December 2005! Also there is ample space to get by it so there is no need to even get close to it. I literally go by it from the moment I get out of bed in the morning to the moment I crawl into bed at night, plus all the other moments I walk by it in a day. On rare occasions I do run it, yet, for the most part I can even navigate past it in the dark, or with my eyes closed because I’m half awake.
That makes today’s repeated, and incredibly painful, connections to the foot board such a mystery. Why today, as I’ve never done this - hit it so many times in one day - before? Why, despite being extra careful and vigilant, does it seem like my poor abused knee was magnetically sucked over to the foot board even when I didn’t have to be anywhere near it?
Alas, I don’t know the answers. It must just be “one of those days.”
Yet, isn’t that the way it is with our lives. Something that is so obvious, and has been a particular way forever, suddenly becomes a stumbling block that trips us and sends us flat on our face.
It isn’t the big things (boulders) that trip us, but the little things (pebbles). It is doing the routine, automatic, things that can result in accidents, not the novel once-in-awhile things. It isn’t something new in our lives, or what we’re learning to do, it’s what we’ve mastered and can do in our sleep that can lead to sloppiness and carelessness.
We assume that because it has always been that way - and we haven’t changed anything - we don’t need to pay attention any more. And when we stop paying attention to our lives, that’s when things really start falling apart.
Where do you need to start paying more attention?
Beth
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