A Door Never Considered

“The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live.” ~ Flora Whittemore

My daughter is not a morning person. Each day, getting her out of bed classifies as a struggle in itself, but getting her ready to get out the door on time to get to school is nothing short than a Herculean task.

Getting dressed is the big challenge – since the time she turned one – and could barely walk – Morgan decided glamour was the name of her game. Before making her appearance, the diva has to select her costume, which involves laying out five different outfits on her bed and making sure they are all color-coordinated and matching her mood of the day; accessories are the next step and their selection takes just as long as choosing the clothes. An hour after getting up, she finally comes downstairs (no rush there either) and takes fifteen minutes to brush her hair.

Daily routine: Morgan gets up around eight and we rush out of the house at 9:15, often eating breakfast in the car because we are running out of time. Rare is the morning when I don’t ponder on the fact that patience must be the lesson I came to learn in this lifetime.

Yesterday morning she surprised me by getting up on her own and sporting a great mood. She tiptoed downstairs and pick-a-booed me in the kitchen, her little cherub eyes sparkling with an unknown glee for that time of day. My first thought was that she was either coming down with a strange virus, or this happy-so-early-in-the-morning attitude was the result of a strange planetary alignment I wasn’t aware of. Regardless, I wasn’t going to look into a gifted horse’s mouth; I smiled brightly and swept her up in my arms. Then, reluctant to let go of the moment, and aware of Morgan’s competitive nature, a sudden thought pierced the fiber of my thoughts and sparked an idea. “Let’s see who can dress first. I bet that I can get dressed faster than you can.” Magic words – Morgan ran up the stairs ahead of me and flew to her bedroom to get dressed. In two minutes she was out of the room with clothes on! I wasn’t about to waste a perfect chance to succeed, so I milked the situation for all it was worth. “I bet I can brush my teeth before you!” I said running to the bathroom. She ran to her own bathroom and brushed her teeth. We repeated the same routine for other tasks and, as if by miracle, we were washed, clothed, fed and ready to go at 9:05.

In the car I couldn’t help wondering why I never thought of appealing to this side of her personality before. We got to school before they even opened the doors, nobody got angry or stressed, and Morgan gave me a huge hug before getting out of the car. Was this the secret I had been searching for? Suddenly, the words “I bet I can do this faster than you” sounded awfully similar to “Open Sesame.”

On the way back home I thought of how many times we continue knocking on doors that refuse to open, and we become frustrated when we get little or no response; we waste our energies and become annoyed, and never once do we think that knocking harder will not make much of a difference; sometimes, we just have to try a different door.

Certainly, this could be just a momentary lapse of drama for her, but looking at it from a different point of perspective, it’s also possible that stifling the original conflict using a game was all that was needed.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that things will continue the same way. Meanwhile, I will take what I can, and I will be thankful for blessing hidden around every corner. Sometimes a different approach is all we need to open new doors leading us to our preferred destination.

Keeping Focused -- Lessons Learned from a Game of Darts

“All you have to do is know where you're going. The answers will come to you of their own accord.” ~ Earl Nightingale

Several years ago, my husband and his family were part of a dart team, and they met every Wednesday evening to compete against other people. Having just arrived to the US from Italy where darts are pretty much un unknown sport, I was intrigued by the accuracy of their game; the few times I tried to throw darts myself, I was relieved that no living being was around – one would have thought I had disjointed arms and aimed the darts at everything but the board.

One day, while we were at his parents’ house and the whole family was practicing for the next tournament, I asked my husband if he could share the secret of his success. “Just fix your eyes on the bullseye,” he said, “and you can’t go wrong.”

Ha! Maybe that worked for him, but in my case I think my eyes and my hands were going through a bit of a cold war and were not talking to one another. I fixed my gaze on the red spot intensely enough that I could have burned a hole into it, but my darts were still all over the place. Angry at myself for my lack of skill, I thought about giving up, but something bigger than that – pride, I think they call it – refused to lift the white flag, and here I was again the next weekend - alone this time to at least save my dignity – shooting darts like a toddler playing with a new water gun. With time my ability to at least hit the board improved, and I even managed to score decently a few times, although I never gained the level of skill the rest of the family had achieved over the years. I wasn’t good enough to play at tournaments, but I could hold my own in a match played at home with the family.

Through the years I realized that approaching new challenges is no different than learning how to shoot darts. You set your eyes on the goal and move through the motions, allowing your mind to evaluate and adjust each time you obtain a less than desirable result. In the end, you might not become an expert, but you will have learned that nothing is unachievable if you continue to try.

The greatest problem with meeting challenges is that many times we don’t focus in the right direction. If rather than staring at the small, red spot in the middle of the board I stared instead at the picture frame hung nearby, sooner rather than later I would have shot a dart in the forehead of the hound in the picture. Focusing on the challenge and assimilating it through our senses is what enables us to send the right data to our higher mind. Once we have a clear picture of what we plan to achieve, our inner mind gets to work to figure out ways to bypass obstacles and deliver us at the doorstep of success.

Clarity is the first step to going somewhere and achieving anything. If a mother wants a more challenging job which will pay her more but will require her to work longer hours, she might find herself in a pickle of a situation trying to figure out how to meet the demands of childcare, so although she doesn’t do it intentionally, she will self-sabotage to give herself more time to work out the details. If she decides the job is what she truly wants, and childcare is the only obstacle in the way, then she can give her mind something well defined to work toward. When I have asked a few people what they want out of life, many of them have replied that they just want to be happy, but what does that exactly mean? Each person is wired to find happiness at different levels, so by saying they want to be happy, they leave the spectrum of possibilities too wide open for the mind to come up with a plan.

Building a beautiful house is not too difficult a job, if one has taken the time to draw a good model plan.