postcards from nowhere

Greetings!

Although we've lived in our house for almost 2 years now, I'm still 
working on meeting all the neighbors.  Last week I was able to cross 
another one off of my list.  

We live in the kind of subdivision where all the houses are variations 
on four basic floor plans.  My recent acquaintance lives in the same 
model as we do, and he immediately wanted to compare our interiors.  
After looking at mine, he took me over to his.  He's done some really 
creative things, knocking down certain walls, building others, putting 
in skylights.  His house was a truly unique expression of his personal 
style, and it was delightful.

But what I found most interesting was the addition he had built to serve 
as a pantry/wine cellar.  The floor was tiled in vibrant red quarry tile. 
The bottom eighteen inches of the walls were the same color as the floor,
with white paint covering the remainder of the wall up to the ceiling.  

He explained to me that this pattern was quite intentional.  In Mexico, 
the color wears off of the floor tile and needs to be reapplied 
frequently.  They paint the bottom of the walls the same color as 
the floor so that the color can be reapplied by basically sloshing 
it on with gusto using a mop and bucket -- with no worries about 
neat edges or precision application.  

You know by now that I see metaphor everywhere.  Well, here's what I saw 
in that room:  I saw the acknowledgment that mistakes are inevitable.  
I saw the playing field being expanded so that the mistakes were included
in the game; included to the extent that they were no longer classified 
as errors, but as part of the game itself!  

It made me wonder . . . how could I expand the playing field for my life 
so that all mistakes are included in the ring and appreciated as part of 
the game?  Instead of judging things as right or wrong, appropriate or 
inappropriate, better or worse, each 'mistake' could offer me the 
opportunity to expand my borders . . . to make my personal field big 
enough to absorb mistakes with minimal damage.  In fact, I'd like to 
play in such a big arena that there are no mistakes!

Here's a true example of what I mean:  A man walked up to the 
receptionist's counter looking for some papers he had turned in 
the week before.  As it turns out, he had provided the original 
documents rather than the requested copies.  Well, the reason 
the office requested copies is because at the end of every week, 
all old documents are shredded.  Uh-oh.  Mistake!

Or is it?  Because coincidentally, just last week, an employee had 
made a 'mistake' while filing.  Those original documents never made 
it to the to-be-shredded file.  They were discovered, in all their 
original splendor, in the wrong folder.  

Ahhh!  I just love stories like that.  

How can anyone possibly know what is a mistake and what isn't?  Isn't 
life much more fun when we just assume that any 'mistakes' (translation: 
things we didn't plan for or expect) are really just hidden surprises?  
Then we get to take the attitude of joyful anticipation while we watch 
to see how it all turns out.

I'm tired of squandering energy resisting things that occur outside my 
arbitrary expectations.  I'd like to expand my edges and blur the 
boundaries . . . leave room for things to get a little sloppy and 
still be ok.  I like the idea of dropping the pretense that everything 
that happens in this universe depends on perfection and accuracy.  
Especially my own narrowly defined concepts of perfection and accuracy!  

I'm just gonna get out my bucket and mop and start sloshing color 
wherever it wants to go.  And in those rare but inevitable circumstances 
when life is about coloring inside the lines, I'm going to draw that 
border on the biggest piece of paper I can find!  

Wishing you wide margins and splashy colors!  

karen

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