Calibration

In each of our lives I think we all have calibrations, times of pause and orientation. Sometimes we take on too much, or we take on too little. We feel out of sorts and we feel far from our normal selves. I get to that point and often don’t realize it for weeks. I suppose we sometimes get to that point and don’t realize it for years. It’s funny how we can fix our mice at our computers, or our cars, or our CD players before we fix ourselves. “It shouldn’t be acting like this!” I’ll say right before I go into the control panel, or the car shop, or grab a CD cleaner. How can I be so technology savvy and so self ignorant?
I think it has a lot to do with how much I expect out of myself. We can all put ourselves under an unfair amount of pressure, to perform, to achieve and to control. To what end? Sometimes burnout. Sometimes success. Sometimes despair. This is where a slew of sayings come to my mind: everything in moderation, inner peace is the key to happiness, be easy on yourself, you cannot perceive beauty but with a serene mind. I think all of those are pretty precise. We have great opportunities each and every day. If we have one to many things weighing us down, we might not get to any of them. Isn’t that crazy? I don’t think it’s crazy, I just think it’s ambitious and shortsighted. In airplane flight, take offs and landings are very exciting but the real trick to accurate travel is constant correction; more than ninety percent of any airplane’s flight is off course. Pilots are constantly aware of their direction and spend all of their time in flight correcting their direction. Not a bad idea really. I think we often forget to do this in our own lives. Sometimes we think we’re broken or need to be fixed. The truth might be we aren’t broken, we just need to be straightened out a little. Patience will get you there, just pause, orientate and calibrate.