Not too long ago I was outside doing a ladder workout (the speed and agility ladder that you would see athletes using, not an actual climb up or down the side of the house ladder). And at the end of the ladder there was a mass of something. Being that our light was broken, the neighbors didn't have theirs on, and the only light came from the moon behind houses and light from the garage, I had a difficult time trying to figure out what the mass was.
My initial thought was that it was a bat. Who does that? I know. But still. The lines and coloring looked like a bat at rest. Seeing as it was on the ground, I thought maybe it was hurt or dead. I was not poking that one. When I worked at the high school, the old gym had a bat infestation. I once almost grabbed a handle with a bat on it. It flew at me right before I almost grabbed it. Yikes. We have bat issues in our neighborhood. So, naturally, I thought it might just be one. As I ran near it and past it, I noticed it didn't move. So clearly, even if it was a bat, it was not alive and moving. The more I looked at this rounded beast the more I tried to convince myself that it was just a leaf. Still, in my heart, I couldn't let it go. It looked like a hunched up bat. I often feel that this is how people view me. They see me lying on the ground as a huddled mass of bat ready to charge at the next person. But that's not me at all. I'm quite docile. I keep to myself. I mind my own business. I just want to make sure my family and I are doing what we need to do. That isn't often received as such. They see me as standoffish, aloof, not willing to interact. None of those are true. I often assume that you see the bat and run away, when I'm only a leaf hanging out. I feel this way in my work as well. For me, working means training clients, writing workouts, writing blogs, writing books, editing, reading, and many things that others wouldn't consider as work. They see a bat. She just wants to huddle off to herself and read books and write stuff down. She can't ever join us for things. She doesn't want to help with what we're doing. Not the case at all. I'm happy to join in, but that also means that I will end up putting my work aside and feeling more pressure on myself to get my work done when you aren't around. I'm not trying to be lazy or unsocial. I just want to work. At the end of my workout, the sun was rising. I cleaned up the ladder and looked down. Before me sat a decent sized dead leaf. Definitely wasn't a bat. In fact, the reason I had seen the shadows and lines as such was because the leaf was concave, not convex as it laid on the ground. How often to we see something and flip it upside down? How often do our mind's eyes switch a harmless leaf to a scary bat? Are we judging people based upon what we see at one time of day in the midst of shadows or in the sunlight of truth? The truth is, we don't always know what another leaf is going through. Those scary lines are more likely shadows playing tricks on us. We must take the time to look at the whole picture.
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May 2023
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