"Feeling all right / I don’t mind that everything’s not going the way I think it should / Living is good"
“Living Is Good,” by Wendy Waldman
Yesterday I introduced you to Isadora the Counting Cat and her rapid mastery of the Fibonacci Sequence. So what broader lessons can we learn from Izzy (besides the inadvisability of letting a cat prove beyond doubt that she’s smarter than you)?
I think these number-sequence puzzles are a great metaphor for the ways in which our lives play out – and for the types of attitudes and perspectives we would do well to maintain as we interpret the “success” or “failure” of the discrete events that make up our life stories.
Think about your own situation. As you react to the day-to-day circumstances of your life, do you set your gaze on the broad and long view? Or do you adopt a certain nearsightedness that only takes in – and draws conclusions from - a narrow scope of events?
If you miss a turn and have to take a detour through an unfamiliar area, does your attention home in on how late you’ll be for your appointment? Or do you make a mental note of points of interest along the new route and tuck away the information for later use?
What about that “perfect” job for which you interviewed – only to wind up as a very close second choice? Do you spend the rest of your life lamenting “what could have been”? Or do you focus instead on the path actually taken – and the benefits you experienced that wouldn’t have come your way had you gotten that job in Valhalla?
In these and similar situations: Can you take off the mental blinders that restrict your view only to the data points right in front of you? Can you stop looking at these events as flaws in the fabric of life and step back to see the elegance of the whole tapestry?
I think these number-sequence puzzles are a great metaphor for the ways in which our lives play out – and for the types of attitudes and perspectives we would do well to maintain as we interpret the “success” or “failure” of the discrete events that make up our life stories.
Think about your own situation. As you react to the day-to-day circumstances of your life, do you set your gaze on the broad and long view? Or do you adopt a certain nearsightedness that only takes in – and draws conclusions from - a narrow scope of events?
If you miss a turn and have to take a detour through an unfamiliar area, does your attention home in on how late you’ll be for your appointment? Or do you make a mental note of points of interest along the new route and tuck away the information for later use?
What about that “perfect” job for which you interviewed – only to wind up as a very close second choice? Do you spend the rest of your life lamenting “what could have been”? Or do you focus instead on the path actually taken – and the benefits you experienced that wouldn’t have come your way had you gotten that job in Valhalla?
In these and similar situations: Can you take off the mental blinders that restrict your view only to the data points right in front of you? Can you stop looking at these events as flaws in the fabric of life and step back to see the elegance of the whole tapestry?
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