Quitting River Moments

Our Thanksgiving Day didn't start out all that brilliantly this year. By 8:30 LC and I were sitting back in the doctor's office, thanks to an early-morning temp of nearly 103F and his offhand comment the evening before of 'My ear is ouch.' Oh great. Hadn't we just come through a week of that nonsense? Then, while in the doctor's waiting room, he stumbled and fell face-first into a table, giving himself his first-ever bloody nose. Poor kid!

Anyway, that all came to pretty much nothing, finding out that it's just a cold and he'd have to have a nose spray (you try finding a 3-year-old who's happy to accommodate that request) and suffer through it. Meanwhile, I had turkeys and pies and veggies, oh my! to cook for the evening. He got to watch lots of Diego and Sesame Street that day.

And then, in the midst of the chaos, the mail/post arrived. In it was a thin, non-descript little envelope....that just happened to contain our own minor Holy Grail. It was a letter from a Dutch elementary school I'd applied LC for just three days earlier. They have a spot for him. He can start on his 4th birthday.

Uh, what? Excuse me? Really? This isn't just some kind of a cruel joke? Remember this little rant I went on about the schools here, and how we'd been battling since March to find him a place? And now I find a school within 15-20min walking / 4 min bike-riding distance that has an immediate spot open for him? AND one of my Dutch friends checked out the education authorities' inspection reports on this school (just to satisfy my skeptical curiosity as to why this school had immediate places when all other schools had 2-year waiting lists), only to find there's not a thing noted as being wrong with this place.

Do these minor miracles really happen in real life? Seriously?

And then I remembered, yes. Of course they do. They're the reason Daddy Big Chief and I met.

If I hadn't been sent to the hospital as a child, I wouldn't have had the money in university to study in London. If I hadn't studied in London, I wouldn't have known I wanted to try to live and work there for a summer. If I hadn't had one the most difficult weeks of my life in a 'foreign' city all by myself at the age of 22, no job, no place to live, just an airline ticket and a dream, I would have never been lead to the book Conversations With God. If it weren't for that book, I would never have been sitting in that questionable London hostel, struggling with frustration, fear, looming depression, anger, and failure...when I finally looked up and said 'Fine. I quit.'

In that moment, I gave up the fight. I said to God/Fate/The One/The Universe whatever you choose to call 'It', I said 'You win. I acknowledge that you're the one calling these shots and I'm just a measly little pawn here, so I'm done fighting. I will go on doing what I'm supposed to do. I'll knock on the doors, I'll make the phone calls, I'll be a good little girl and make all the right moves, but I'm finished working myself up into an absolute frenzy about it. I'll do my best, then I'm dropping the battle and letting you get on to do your best. Got it? You win.'

Within 16 hours, I had the live-in pub job that lead me to meet my future husband just two days after that. By quitting, I won. And I won BIG.

And so it seems to be the case with schools. When we finally stopped fighting the system and said 'Ok, Mr System, you figure it out.' The system did just that.

This little story also illustrates one of my favorite ideas from my most favorite of books, The Tao of Pooh / The Te of Piglet (which is pretty much one book in two parts). In The Te of Piglet, the concept of a flowing river coming up against a boulder is discussed. Does the river try to negotiate with the boulder, rationalizing the reasons why it should move out of its way? Does it get depressed and give up, forever stranding itself in front of the boulder? Does it rage and scream and get violent with the boulder, demanding it move RIGHT NOW or suffer some horrible consequence?

Nope. The river just flows around it.

I read those books for the first time over ten years ago now, and that 'lesson' has never left me. I won't lie and say I'm always able to be that river. There are most definitely times I rage, wallow in self-pity, and all manner of other things that do no good. But when I have clarity, I do try to be the river. I like to call them my River Moments. And as you can see, they can really pay off.

So to all my loved ones out there, I wish you many Quitting River Moments ... and all the blessings they bring you.