From Les
Yesterday
was a kind of milestone for us. The
plumbers got the new water heater running and the sewer line rooted out. You may think this wasn’t such a big
achievement with all that we’ve gotten ourselves into, but I can tell you it
was huge. For some twenty days now we’ve
been making potty runs to local gas stations, restaurants, grocery stores,
etc., as well as mooching showers off of our daughter and other friends. We were to the point of getting all excited
whenever we needed to go some place and we’d remember that they had decent
restrooms. Hey, we’ve been without TV and
stereo too so it doesn’t take much to entertain us.
But
yesterday we had a real breakthrough . . . literally. The old grossed out and clogged sewer line
was ridden of its contents. It was like
the final push through to daylight in a tunneling project, making way for our
one working toilet to get into action. Yee
Hah! And the hot shower was – well,
let’s just call it luxurious. The
electrical wiring to that part of the house hasn’t been redone yet so it was a
shower under the warm glow of a mechanics drop light. I’m calling it the NEO-INDUSTRIAL look,
complete with sawdust and rusty nails on the floor.
To be
honest, I felt at home finally because this is our toilet and our
shower stall. Of course they’ll be
spiffied up a bit in coming days when we get to that part of the house, but for
now I feel like a king in my castle. So
the old saying “Home is where your ____ is”,
can now take on a whole new range of possibilities such as “Home is
where your toilet is” or “Home is where your shower is.”
It’s
amazing how we can make adjustments and adapt to our environment. I heard an interesting interview on NPR the
other day with a Harvard professor of Neuro Science talking about that very
thing. Thanks to MRI’s and sophisticated
diagnostics they now have the means to map how our brains work and process
information. He said that what amazed
him the most as a clinician was our brain’s ability adapt and overcome
adversity. It seems that negative
thoughts, traumas and memories leave imprints in the brain that light up on a
brain scan, but those imprints typically seem to fade away within 12-18 months.
Of
course he wasn’t factoring in the positive and cleansing affect of forgiveness
and grace. But even so, he said it is
clear that we were hard-wired to overcome.
My question to him would be . . . who hard-wired us? J
No comments:
Post a Comment