“Wanna make God laugh? Tell Her your plans”–anonymous
I haven’t blogged for 2 weeks. Hell, I haven’t done anything for 2 weeks. Except see the doctor. Who told me I had the flu…and to stay in bed.
What?? Stay in bed??? I had important things to do!!! I had a teleclass coming up. A retreat to market. A speech to write. An interview scheduled. Clients to coach. I had no time for the damn flu!!!
Yet here I am, still in bed, bemoaning my fate, but too weak to do anything.
Then my mind traveled back to my last visit with my daughter, the farmer, just last month.
The week I was there, the seedlings that Anna and others had started were sprouting. It was time to plant them in the fields. The baby chicks were now mature hens. It was time to move them to bigger quarters.
But nature had other plans. It poured. And rain was forecast for the next few days.
You can’t plant when it rains, Anna explained, because the wet fields are too fragile. And the ground was too wet to drive the truck to the other henhouse.
Here they were, all geared up to do both. I watched in awe at what happened next. No one got uptight. No one cursed nature. No teeth were mashing or hands wringing.
Instead, the farm owner shrugged his shoulders, and said: “Enjoy the down time.” (What a concept!)
We found other things to do. (I say ‘we’ because, by then, I’d been recruited into the workforce.) We cleaned the eggs. We did outreach. One woman made a delicious apple crisp. Another couple worked on a brochure. We had a scrumptious stir-fry, loaded with freshly picked veggies.
What really struck me: everyone seemed grounded in a deep sense of faith–a respect for nature’s timing, a deference to forces out of their control, a trust in a higher order–that was so strong, they were able to dispense with their plans, embrace the delays, go with the flow and enjoy the whole process….with nary a complaint.
As I remembered this scene, I immediately saw the lesson.
Instead of fighting the current, why don’t I just kick back and relish the ride…even if it feels like I’m going nowhere?
I’ve written so much about surrender in this blog (Sweet Surrender) I guess I thought it was a onetime event. But I’m beginning to see…. the Universe has its own sense of timing. Instead of trying to out-control the cosmos, I’m going to lie back, let life unfold, delight in the downtime and do what comes next. In this case, I think I’ll write a blog!
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