In some ways, right now I feel as though I am flipping through a tattered photo album. I am recalling precious memories and bringing to mind valuable things I knew but had forgotten. I am savoring where I am now looking back at where I had been. I am so grateful….
The writing below is my journal entry on November 20, 2012. This was a very tender time as I was anticipating a major surgery on the 26th. I was to have what was described as a “very aggressive” mass removed from my abdomen (along with all my feminine parts).
This morning I was having trouble seeing with a light in the living room. Over a year ago the lamp in there stopped working, and I have kept thinking I don’t want to live in this house so I don’t want to buy new furniture for it, so I have limped along with just the floor lamp. It has made morning devotions in there next to impossible.
This morning I decided that if I am going to be recovering in there over the next several weeks, I deserve to have a lamp that works. I decided I would go out and buy new lamps, then I got to thinking about these lamps. They are structurally good lamps, in great shape. It is just the touch-on/off sensor mechanism that is bad.
Before I had time to think about it, I took the lamp apart!
I decided, “I could rewire it!”
All the while, I was working on the lamp, I kept hearing my inner coach telling me what parts I needed,and where to find them. I was being told exactly what I needed to do right now.
At one point, it was a matter of making sure that I removed a little metal ring I had left on the lamp and the message (loud and clear) was, “What is not needed needs to be removed.”
Other messages came flooding in.
“For too long you have tolerated what wasn’t working.”
“When you really know what you want, everything you need has been there all along.”
“Body and mind need to work together, not too much focus on just one or the other.”
I only found one wire nut, and I needed two. As I kept looking for a second one, I heard, “Working on the body, without the mind or working on the mind, without the body is like only having one wire nut. It just doesn’t get the job done! It’s not much better than working on neither.”
I had the lamp reassembled, and I thought I had it tightened down, but when I looked more closely, it was actually very caddywhompus. I knew I needed to straighten it out. I was so excited to glue the base back on the lamp.
I heard, “It’s important to be patient. You need to prepare the work surface correctly, to ensure that what you are doing is safe, and won’t cause other damage.”
I was getting quite hyper, desperately wanting to find that second wire nut so that I could get the lamp finished. I only had one small pack of epoxy—the kind that I needed to mix— so I needed to glue the felt bottom on both lamps at the same time.
I became aware that I was hungry. I had been ignoring my body’s need for food, because I was so focused on finishing what I was doing. The message was clear, “You benefit by having patience and staying aware that the immediate needs of your body must take priority over the demands of your emotions or mind.”
Today I was telling all of this to some friends who stopped by. He worked as an electrician before he retired, so he knew very well what the steps are in the process of rewiring a touch-on/off lamp. He is going through cognitive challenges, having been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. I know my sharing with him was not just about my handyman skills. The meaningful messages for all of us are right here in the lessons of the lamp….
