Paint it Black, Please

There they were, 60 freshly painted white doors with black trim in my thirty-unit apartment building. Great job. Except for one minor detail: this was the opposite of what I asked my maintenance guy to do. I specified BLACK doors with WHITE trim.

I don’t usually fly off the handle, but this mix-up really torqued me. My first impulse was to chew him out, but the BPOR (Better Part Of Rob) took control and said, “take a walk.”

So I headed across the street to stroll around our local pond, stopping first to pick up my indispensable advisor and walking companion, Shakespeare. A fluorescent green, 12-inch Amazon parrot, Shakespeare sits on my shoulder during walking excursions, ever on the lookout for things I should REALLY pay attention to.

As we rounded the bend, Shakespeare leaned toward me and gently nibbled on my ear (that’s his way of telling me to look at something.) I ignored him. He nibbled a little harder as if to say, “Yo stupid, there’s a magnificent cardinal sitting in the birch tree). I still ignored him. He nibbled way harder and made his point: I had a choice of enjoying a moment of beauty and serenity, or I could stew in my own anger and fantasies about dressing down my maintenance guy for his mistake.

I walked another hour, listening to Shakespeare and focusing on the wonders of the pond, including a beautiful swan that sat peacefully on the mirror-smooth water. At the end of the walk, I’d recovered my usual peaceful state of mind.

To a mole, sunshine is bad news. Shakespeare does a great job of letting me know when I’m being a mole. What happened was that I stopped chanting “WOE is me!” by granting myself the inner freedom I needed to look at the world from a very different perspective. Like magic, as my mood transformed from angry to grateful, it changed the world around me.

Here’s what learned from this little adventure:
• When I’m inwardly ill-at-ease, I don’t see life as it is. I see life as I am at the moment

• When I elevate my mood from “Woe is me” to “Wow, look at the beauty around me,” I elevate my problem from gloomy to easily solvable – let’s just repaint the doors and trim again.

• Just as a helium balloon rises higher when excess weight is dropped out of the basket, my mood rises higher when I drop the excess baggage of WOEful thinking from my mind.

By the way, when I met with my building manager the next day, he’d already taken the personal initiative to correct half the mistake – he and the crew worked overtime and finished the doors. All that was left was the trim.

Funny how life can work out if we give it a chance, isn’t it. The mistake can oftentimes be undone without a lot of drama.