Musings from Left Field

Ok, yes. I was laid off on Fri­day. I’m sure this will pro­vide me with plenty of mate­r­ial to write about once I fig­ure out what the heck hap­pened. I’m still pretty shell shocked (which sur­prises me) so instead of deal­ing with the real­ity of it, I’m pre­tend­ing I’m on an extended dream ‘hol­i­day’ taken with my fab­u­lous imag­i­nary Euro­pean vaca­tion days (don’t they get a month or more?).

To make the most of my illu­sions of grandeur, I’ve taken on a project that has turned out to have a sim­i­lar scale of hal­lu­ci­na­tion: Paint­ing. I intend to trans­form ONE wall in my house into a happy thing to stare at. sounds easy right? Wait, wait…Here’s the catch: I picked the most dif­fi­cult wall there was.

This is not your ordi­nary wood pan­el­ing. It’s not par­ti­cle­board. It has 1/4 inch-deep routed grooves every 4 inches. It’s shel­lacked, stained wood. It’s old. It’s dingy. It’s knot­ted. It’s real wood.

Did I men­tion it’s real wood? This is why the whole room is still in this cur­rent state, 3 years after we moved in. The guilt over paint­ing real wood has been debilitating.

But now that I’m newly lib­er­ated from 45 – 50 hours of my pre­vi­ously planned weeks, I am look­ing at this guilt in a whole new light.

I’ve been dumped, and so I’m dump­ing the guilt. Some­times we need a whole new jolt in our life to real­ize that the things we hold onto based on ide­al­ism some­times become things that hold us back and keep us from grow­ing. It’s a painful les­son, but one I’ll be rein­forc­ing with every painful brush­stroke in those dingy routed pan­el­ing grooves.