A while ago, when it was still winterish in Mississippi (even though it was spring), I was feeling terribly under the weather. Anyone who had been paying attention to the news in early spring knew that Mississippi had some horrible weather with tornadoes ripping across the state, leaving a path of destruction, devastation, and even death. Whenever there are drastic shifts in the weather—a swift change from hot to cold, or from cold to hot—my body reacts with aches and pains. This time I even had chills all day long. So, when dinner time rolled around, rather than drinking water like I normally do, I longed for a cup of hot tea. The only problem was I didn’t have any tea. I checked my pantry anyway even though I distinctly remembered using the last of my tea bags and not replenishing them.
I told my husband, “Don’t think I’m crazy when you see me drinking a cup of hot water with my dinner. I really want tea, but I don’t have any. So I’m just gonna drink hot water with cinnamon and sugar.”
“Okay,” he said with an I-don’t-care-what-you-drink kind of shrug.
So, I had my hot cinnamon and sugar water and pretended it tasted like tea. When my daughter came home from work, I told her about my dinner time drink. “It actually kind of tasted like tea,” I said.
Her response: “Yeah. Sure, Mom.”
The next day, I was feeling a little better and was back in the mood for coffee, so I made me a pot. As I was pouring a cup, I noticed something on the counter.
It was tea.
It was tea that had been there the whole time.
It was tea that had been there for months.
It was tea that belonged to my daughter and not to me.
I keep my tea in the pantry. My daughter keeps her tea on the counter. I had been so focused on my nonexistent tea in the pantry that I failed to notice the tea that was sitting directly in my line of vision as I prepared the cup of hot water and cinnamon the evening before. The other weird thing is that neither my husband nor my daughter noticed the tea. Well, my daughter might have thought about the fact that she had tea and assumed I only wanted my own chamomile tea.
Either way, I called them both and had a good laugh about it. But something that my husband said really stood out for me when I said that it was interesting how neither he nor Chloe said anything about the tea on the counter. He responded, “What was in your mind had become all of our reality. You made up your mind that there was no tea, so your eyes couldn’t see the tea even though it was right there in front of you. Then you convinced us that there was no tea, so our eyes couldn’t see it either.”
Whoa. “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,” says the proverb. What we think can become our reality, so much so that it blinds us to what truly is real.
Carefully guard your thoughts because they are the source of true life. -Proverbs 4:23
Now you know I have to equate this to my writing life. Sometimes I’m prone to complain about feeling stuck: My books aren’t selling, nobody wants to buy my current manuscript, the draft I’m writing reads like crap, I’m a loser….
As those thoughts become my reality, I’m left feeling sad and dejected. But, when I open my eyes and see—really see—what’s in front of me, my perspective shifts.
Whoa. I’m a published author! I wrote my first manuscript for a novel in 1994. That’s almost thirty years ago. I eventually self-published that manuscript seven years later, wrote a few more manuscripts that I self-published, then ultimately decided to stay the course and break into traditional publishing. It took me six years of writing, rewriting, querying, and getting more rejections than the goofiest nerd at the prom (who eventually became my husband, btw) before I finally got an agent and a traditional book deal.
When I open my eyes and see—really see—what’s in front of me, my perspective shifts.
But I persevered. I stayed the course. I finished the race. I accomplished my goal of getting traditionally published, and now, I have had three books published over the last six years. One day as I was bemoaning the fact that my books aren’t selling the way I want them to, a friend pointed out the fact that every one of my books has received some type of award, and that is not something to be taken lightly. That is something to celebrate! Because I was focused on the wrong thing (book sales), I was not seeing the gift that was sitting right in front of my eyes.
I might not be making a ton of money, but…
After all those years of struggling, I am a published author!
What are you NOT seeing while your focus is on the wrong thing?
Wise words. It’s all perspective!
You are so right!