Life lessons hit when you have no place to take cover. Frankly, they’re everywhere! You complain you need more shoes until you meet a man who lost his feet to diabetes or an incendiary device blew off his legs in a war he didn’t start. A lesson.
You complain your children’s music is too loud until your hearing begins to leave you as you age. You’d do anything to hear them laugh more or speak, “I love you” to you. A lesson.
A most magnificent lesson hit me when I had no place to take cover this weekend. I hopped in my trusted Toyota to trek to the city for rations. The sun shone bold. Not a cloud in the sky above the land I call “home.” The humidity wasn’t yet oppressive but it surely made itself known. If you ever wonder – just take a look at my hair. I usually straighten it with heat more oppressive to it than the North Dakota summer humidity is. Humidity makes my naturally curly hair that I dislike curl into unruly, wild curls galore. I drove with that kind of hair.
Not but three miles up the road the prairie view became expansive. To the south and east a wall of grey ominously made its way towards me. In order for me to turn west – I had to first stop. I was in a hurry and didn’t much feel like stopping at the peculiar stop sign placed smack dab at a little traveled intersection. That two second stop took my breath away. Directly below the cloud of grey was a wheat field surrounded by prairie grass, trees and a slough. To the west of the intrusive grey sky was periwinkle blue. My head did that bobble thing back and forth. I looked east to the grey and I looked west to the periwinkle twinkling the promise of a great day.
Why then did I feel opposite? Nothing in me felt like turning west towards the blue. Everything on the ground appeared bland and common. When I looked back to the grey east – every single created thing appeared bolder! The color of the wheat and hay were awe inducing. The color green takes on a hue that the technicolor specialists in Hollywood cannot duplicate -not even with computers! Even the grey of the water of a slough becomes more majestic but only because the grey of the sky accents it. A lesson.
It takes days that feel grey to make us recognize a regular day is grand, magnificent and destined for us to stay. It takes a grey day to make a perfectly blue sky day feel yellow!
You can force lessons, too. Good and bad.
I’m going to go teach myself that eating mint chocolate chip ice cream for breakfast is something the girth of my thighs will regret. Or is the lesson in eating ice cream for breakfast the fact that bad things for our bodies can be good things for our taste buds? You decide. I’m willing to sacrifice myself to learn this lesson. I’ve learned all the lessons I can from eating just eggs and bacon. Once a lesson learns you – there’s no good reason to go back and test it.
Live lucking out with lessons and be sure to teach as much as you learn. That’s what lessons are all about.
The Blonde on the Prairie is a lover of ND. She is an author and motivational speaker, owner of “Monkey Balls” food truck and Joyologist to the elderly and disabled.
