Cont’d from Seeing is believing in ‘letting go’ process 1-30-10

“Letting go” is a process I thought I had completely bought into when I “gave up” trying to control things and had surgery done on my eye.

 But, here I was, more than two weeks later, having used that one contact lens in my good eye, the right one, and it had torn. I wore that sucker three or four days with the tear. Got a slight irritation, but I’m on a fixed income now, and I didn’t want to pay for a new one. In addition, it would have taken longer ordering through the eye facility next to the Target Pharmacy, then to see the optomitrist to get a new pair of glasses.

That is, if you had the lenses to provide the doctor with. I gave up my search for the glasses, got into my car and drove away from my house, hoping I could get a completely new pair. After all, I did have a detached retina operation, as well as two in-office laser surgeries. So what if I was careless in not saving my spectacles. Surely, someone could offer a little compassion for this tired old veteran. (Me!)

I worried about the lost glasses about half-way through my drive. Had to give up a store-bought cup of coffee because I spent my “cushion time,” you know, that extra time you give yourself for an inevitabe screw-up (also known as Murphy’s Law “Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong“), in a wasted effort to find the glasses. Didn’t have time to stop at MacDonalds. Had to travel without that caffeine, and you can imagine how that feels in the morning. But, by the second half of the trip my meditation practice kicked in. I “let go” of my anxiety. “Whatever will be, will be” became my mantra.

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I arrive at the hospital with only a minute to spare. Let’s give a final look for those glasses, I say, stretching toward the floor of my car. No, not beneath the passenger seat, the front or the back of the seat. Let me look under the front of the drivers’ seat. No. Now, let’s take a look at that seat from the back seat view. I get out of the car, open the left rear door, kneel down and remove two pens lodged between metals parts on the side of the seat. The right side. The same side where I last saw my glasses in the jacket pocket.

What’s this? I say, as my hand glides over another plastic object that feels vaguely like another pen. Wait! It’s too thin to be a pen. It has a bend at the one end.

Well, what do you know? My glasses. There they are. Stuck in the right side beneath the driver’s seat in a spot you could only get to by looking and reaching towards from the a position at the rear of the car.

“Letting Go” does not come naturally to me. It is something I have to work at. So, too is the required faith I need to believe in the magical process that manifests when you truly do “let go.”

Now I got new frames with a new stem and a new “outlook” for hope in my life.