Ever have one of “those” days, when you wake up with a sense of foreboding that some thing’s just “not right” before even giving the day a proper chance to establish itself? This morning was no different than any other day of the week, except Friday, of course; we all know that every Friday is officially recognized as Charlie Bravo Day. Then I realized the problem; instead of looking upward, outward, or inward for inspiration, I instead looked exactly where I shouldn’t have.
I checked my social media.
The negativity was enough to gag a maggot; almost every story concerning politics, division, abuse, bullying, strife, and on and on, but the common denominator of them all?
Fear.
How am I to encourage others when I start my day with a big bowl of steaming negativity?
When I was released from my physical crate back in January 2015, I resolved to never be so confined again, and that includes letting others confine my mind.
When dad and Zach let me out of the crate, they had no choice but to leave me there while they rode the bikes home to get the truck; I had no guarantee that they would or would not return, but I did have hope. I knew that when they came back, they would come back to the last place they had seen me, so in my mind at least, my opened crate no longer represented a prison but a landmark.
Now that I’m queen of the Casa, I can look back and see that the crate is also an analogy of other areas in our lives; substitute my crate with your cubicle at work, with a toxic relationship, with an addiction, a negative body image, or any other example where we decide, consciously or subconsciously, to stay in a situation that it would be infinitely more preferable to leave? Others may see our crates, and we may see others, and wonder, “how do they tolerate living in such confinement?”, when neither party realizes that this is our/their reality?
How many times have we heard of someone losing a job or relationship only to find the freedom to explore new opportunities, opportunities that were impossible to to be seen when being viewed from the inside of a crate?
And even the worst of habits can be used sometimes for the good; one of dad’s predominate vices is procrastination. Recently, he lost a good portion of soft white underbelly(20#, thank you very much) by utilizing this, putting off that trip through the drive through(breakfast burrito with raspberry sweet tea, please) for just a little longer until he realized he wasn’t doing it at all(or at least as often).
The same vice can be used when it comes to giving up; when it feels inevitable, just put it off, if even for a minute. A minute will grow into an hour, an hour into a day, a day into a new lifetime. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, this is one of the ways I survived my time in the crate, that, and my dogged determination to never give up, no matter how hopeless and claustrophobic things became.
So go forth and Chark this weekend, and stay aware of those crates that others would use to confine you, but more importantly, be ready to act when you can help free someone from theirs.
Chark diem!
