Granny had a small poster right next to her back door.
Emblazoned on it
were the words, "The Hurrier I Go, the Behinder I
Get". It is one of the
ways I bring my Granny to my children, who never had
the chance to meet
her in person. Last year, I got pulled over because I
was in a hurry. I
admit it, I rolled through the stop sign.
As the officer walked to my window, I gathered my
paperwork (insurance
forms, registration, license). I looked into his face,
smiled weakly and
said, "My Granny always used to tell me, the
hurrier I go, the Behinder I
get."
He smiled weakly back and took my information.
Immediately I began
berating myself for my driving behavior. I quickly
elevated my self talk
to a personally destructive tone. "When I was young
and cute I never got
tickets! I would get warned and told I could go every
time!" No longer in
my twenties, I felt myself aging exponentially as I
remembered a rise in
insurance rates and worried some of my friends would
see me pulled over. I
escalated my emotions, feeling worse and worse and
worse as I waited for
the officer to bring me my ticket.
I watched in my review mirror as he walked towards my
car. I told myself
to just accept the penalty with a good attitude. I
looked him straight in
the eye, gathering up as much positive energy as a
wilted flower could
muster. I saw his lips move as he spoke words that
sounded as if they came
out somewhere over my head. "I am not going to give
you a ticket today,
ma'am. Please take your time when you come to stop
signs. Have a great day."
It was at the moment of realization that I would not
get a ticket that I
started to cry. I blinked quickly, trying to prevent
the already
overflowing water, and whispered, "Thank you" I had to
sit and contain
myself for a minute before I continued driving.
When we are constantly in a hurry, we tend to get
careless. We miss the
messages that are being spoken to us, both the obvious
and the subtle. We
rush haphazardly through life, with our radios we use
to tune into our
life constantly filled with static. This causes our
Truth to go unnoticed.
Statesman Winston Churchill said, "Men stumble over
the truth from time to
time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if
nothing happened."
Tuning into this incident, the message I hear is
multi-fold. One message
is when I try to cut corners, I am actually creating
more constraints on
my time. Coupled with hurry is a mentality of "not
having enough" which
spills over into the rest of my life. Never having
enough time leads to
not having enough money which leads to not having
enough supportive
friendships which leads to....well, you get the drift.
To "de-program" from the negative spiral, replace the
"Not enough" with "I
have plenty of time, an abundance of money, a wide
network of supportive
and caring friends". Refocusing on your positive
possibilities rather than
the prison of "not enough" has an amazingly magical
quality. Suddenly,
your abundance will start showing up when and where
you least expect it.
Finally, I imagine Granny smiling down upon us from
heaven. Seeing that I
grew up to be just fine, the mom of three wonderful
girls myself. I
remember time she spent with me, never seeming to be
in a "hurrier" space.
She must have been there at some time, or that
weathered sign would not be
in her kitchen! I knew her as a person with her radio
always keenly tuned.
Go forward with ease and steadiness. Bring forward
Granny's message to
your loved ones. "In plentiful, amazing ways, you
are loved."
