A Day in the Life of Mickey Mouse

“Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson


Yesterday morning, my daughter unearthed an old Italian Disney comic book, and asked me to read it with her. In the story we read, Mickey Mouse and Goofy are hired by the local museum to go investigate the historical sinking of a large ship which tragically went down right after its inauguration. To get them back to the day of the event, Professor Zapotec invites them to use a time machine he invented himself.

Mickey and Goofy embark on their journey back in time, and “land” near the shipyard just a few hours before the inauguration. The story is ripe with adventure and imagination, and eventually, our heroes are able to save the ship, and the accident – due to a miscalculation on behalf of the engineer in charge of the design – is avoided.

When they return to the present, they walk out of the time machine to find a surprised Professor Zapotec who asks them the reason why they were inside of his invention. Mickey and Goofy exchange a confused look, and tell Zapotec of the mission he had assigned to them that same morning. When he seems to have no clue of what they are talking about, Mickey asks him to read the article in the old newspaper Zapotec had showed them before the trip. Professor Zapotec peruses the paper, but he cannot find the article. Since Mickey and Goofy changed the history of the event, the accident never happened, the story was never reported, and the professor never hired them to investigate the mystery.

The story was one of pure fantasy, but the concept behind it embraces a very important point – if we can heal what happened in the past, we no longer need to worry about the old hurt impacting our present and future.

Unresolved issues don’t just go away. Once they have slipped away from the grip of consciousness and are stored into our subconscious, they are no longer available to our memory, but they still impact our realities. Quite often, an honest reflection on the patterns in one’s life can cue the individual to the identity of the hidden triggers; if the triggers are lured to the surface, dealt with and released, the spell is broken – once healed, the old wound disappears and its effects on the present reality of the individual are erased.

Coming face to face with old wounds is an important step into dealing with our present problems. Until they are dealt with, past hurts continue to replay and affect our lives negatively, but the emotional charge associated with them is no longer as powerful as it was when we originally buried them into the chamber of our subconscious. Being our present circumstances different as well, once we bring them to the surface they no longer appear as big as they did when they occurred.

Inviting our past hurts back into awareness might not be as quick and simple as Mickey and goofy’s adventure in the time machine, but once the journey is complete we will be thrilled that the article was never written.

The Value of Conflict

“The greatest conflicts are not between two people but between one person and himself.” ~ Garth Brooks


Great things can come out of conflict, often starting on a personal level. When an event suddenly precipitates, wounds are exposed, giving the individual the opportunity to go through a process of self-cleansing aimed at preventing any additional festering. Conflict can, at times, be destructive, but we must keep in mind that if something is faulty, then we must knock the old structure down before we can rebuild a more solid one.

Generally speaking, salt sprinkled on healthy skin might, at worst, mildly irritate; but, if the same amount of salt is placed on an open wound, it will burn and cause quite a bit of discomfort until the wound is flushed.

Whenever we run into a person, or a situation, which causes excessive annoyance, before we allow emotions to take over and feed the exchange, we should sit back and ask ourselves why we are so irritated. Could it be, somehow, that whatever is causing us so much distress is merely exposing a sore spot within ourselves which we are not wiling to consider?

It is certainly easier to lash out at others for the faults we hide within ourselves, because the “punishment” we receive this way is one we endure by reflection and not by direct self-judgment which may be too harsh to bear. Something the person said touches on a weak point, and in some strange way, what they said unleashes an emotional charge already present inside of us from a past hurt. Once emotions start slipping through, we feel vulnerable, and we become angry; by lashing out we create a boomerang effect, and we are fed the negative energy we didn’t dare throwing at ourselves.

Strangely, we seem to attract into our lives people who mirror our own dark twin, and by dealing with them we learn how to deal with ourselves. Their connection to us might not be immediately apparent, but if one is honest and truly willing to look within, it won’t be long before the tie is identified.

We can’t erase conflict from our lives, but we can change the way we are affected by it if we can train ourselves to see it as a learning tool rather than a hindering block. Conflict on the way is like having a compact mirror with us at all times – we might not like what we see once we look at the reflection, but we now have a tool to begin our improvement.

No Longer Afraid

Many of us probably remember when, as children, we believed monsters were lurking in the darkness of our closet, or lay hidden under our bed, patiently waiting to seize us as soon as our parents left the room. Although we were told they weren’t real, in our minds we could picture them clearly: huge and threatening, their eager, yellow, slimy fangs glimmering in the shadows, ready to swallow us in one single bite.
As adults we still fear the monsters lurking in the unknown and the forgotten, and often picture them much mightier than they really are. The monsters we fear as adults lurk behind the curtains of important decisions, or in the chambers of the mind we have chosen to lock away after being emotionally wounded. The two are quite different from one another.
The monsters we fear when we find ourselves at an important crossroad in our lives are birthed by the apprehension we feel when facing uncertainty. Most of us experience anxiety when not sure of what will unfold; we tend to expect the worst as a defense mechanism; by doing so, we are already braced for disaster before taking the turn and don’t feel as concerned with being attacked by unforeseen events. In the majority of cases, the apprehension we feel is unfounded and mostly feeds on insecurities. In some situation, we feel as if we are facing a daunting task which will drain us of vital energy; once we get started with the project – and get swept into the flow of things – the work gets done and we realize it wasn’t too bad after all.
The other type of monsters we need to face, at times, are the ones we have kept locked away in the attic of our mind, those which caused us great pain in the past and we tried to forget about, the very same ones which haunt our dreams and taint our daily life. This kind of monster is the scariest to face. After being locked away for so long, we have forgotten what it truly looks like, and our imagination paints it much bigger and much more threatening. Truth is, after being locked away for several years, the monster has weakened, and the emotional charge which we attached to it when it was free and able to harm us has depleted with time. After so much time away from it, we have also become stronger and more able to defeat it, so we no longer need to fear it as the mighty giant it used to be.
Once exposed to the light of a conscious confrontation, it will likely appear for what it truly is: an old, residual fragment of the original monster, void of energy and greatly undernourished because of the new choices we have made for ourselves. By keeping it tucked away, we have assumed that its power would never lessen, and have saved it in our mind’s eye as being as big as it was when we locked it away. We have chosen to keep it alive out of sheer fear, and fed it on occasion with our anxiety and doubts.
At some point, it is time for the monsters to be slain. It is time to bring them out and face them in the light of day; only then we will see that the fear of the monster is much larger than the monster itself.