Tuesday, February 22, 2011

It's All In How You See It . . . Or Don't.

The other day I was making homemade noodles using an old family recipe. I've made it a hundred times, rolling of the dough, cutting the noodles, laying them out to dry. In the process I touched my eye. A tiny speck of wheat flour landed on my lashes and found its way under the eye lid and onto my eye ball.

The speck of irritation became immediately annoying. I rubbed. I teared up. I rubbed more. I blinked. No luck.

Within hours my eye was red and puffy like I'd been on the losing end of boxing match and still . . . I could not get that speck of wheat flour out. Now if you've ever seen ground wheat flour it is like sawdust, like sand, like, well, a small little curse of metal shavings basically on my ever sensitive eyeball.

How could such a tiny particle of wheat flour do so much damage? I could hardly see, was perpetually winking at people in the market, on the road, even hours later as I talked to my children. Ridiculous really.

It was so irritating. Yes, that is what is was. Irritating. And I was irritable.

As I looked up the synonyms of irritable:

—Synonyms
1. snappish, petulant, resentful. Irritable, testy, touchy, irascible are adjectives meaning easily upset, offended, or angered. Irritable means easily annoyed or bothered, and it implies cross and snappish behavior: rude and hostile; Impatient and irritable, constantly complaining. Testy describes the same kind of behavior or response, particularly to minor annoyances: always on edge, testy and sharp in response; testy and petulant, resenting any interruption. Touchy emphasizes oversensitivity and readiness to take offense, even when none is intended:

I've always believed that things that happen physically often are a mirror of what is happening emotionally. The sooner we get the emotional lesson, the sooner physical symptoms can resolve as well.

Yup - that has been me for the last while. Irritable. And over the tiniest of things. Snappish. Testy. Resentful. A speck of dust, a flaw in someone else, an imperfection, an obstacle that keeps me from seeing clearly.

I was so grateful when the wheat flour speck found its way out so my eye could heal. And I was grateful to see clearly without being irritated.

Oh the lessons life gives us - it's all in how we see it isn't it?