Finding yourself on the far side

 

 FINDING YOURSELF ON THE FAR SIDE—-THANKS GARY LARSON

You ever notice that. There are weeks when  you don’t find a smile crossing your face all that often—no?—just me?   Okay then well this  was one of those weeks when my emotional line graph probably looked like the Screaming Eagle roller coaster at Six Flags or something and smiles (either internal or external haven’t been a constant.  However..that changed. This morning!  Why?   

Two interesting cosmic tumblers rolled into place this morning— tumbler 1 came about as I  used my tongue to push some left over food particles out of a hole in  one of my wisdom teeth.  I know you’re thinking  “well that explains a lot the wisdom is gone in this dude...his teeth can’t even hold it in anymore.   anyway... I thought  I should go to the3 dentist sometime  before too long and get that tooth  fixed as in pulled.    While most people have  some unpleasant dentist memories...mine always make me smile (pun. Intended) because my first dentist visits were to the office of  Dr. Hippy and Doctor Payne.   Now this was in the sixties and I was a kid, but the names are funny and sad even so... if you are going to be Dr.Payne you might as well be a dentist in my opinion.   Now on my second visit to the dentist I got stabbed by one of those probes and it hurt so by reflex I bit down..well I chomped on the dentist pretty hard and refused to  release the finger of the guy—and that got me kicked out of the chair never to return to a dentist  until sometime in my mid thirties.  But if you had Dr. Payne as a dentist you might think twice.  In fact, I was just about to shake it off when I learned that today was the birthday of Doc Holiday—-Now  going to a dentist has never been a holiday and Doc Holiday isn’t known for his  work around incisors  so much as for his skill at the card table and with  a pistol.   Now fact drifts some distance from fiction in most Hollywood ortrayals (I think that’s the first time I have ever typed the word portrayal—that makes twice—) so I’m sure my concept of the Doc is glorified, and yet thinking of his personality makes  me grin.   

So don’t forget to floss or you might find yourself on the wrong end of some harmful hardware....

that would have been enough to. Get me in a better frame of mind and then the second tumbler came about... I was reflecting about how to  stay in the moment after going down the dentist’s memory lane.  I tried to remind myself that  circumstances change and that my tooth didn’t hurt just now...Being from the 70s I thought “it’s a bummer that I can’t get into the dentist because of the pandemic.’’  A real bummer—I focused on that  word and the mental association vat containing “bummer opened up an image from one of my favorite cartoons.   the cartoon is of some dear standing out in the forest and one dear stares at his friend another dear noticing that his  friend has what looks like a target displayed on his body.  The non-targeted dear says....”bummer of a birthmark pal”.  Well sometimes  circumstance in life are just going to. Stink and that can’t be controlled all the time... sometimes it’s about acceptance.  Speaking of acceptance...the cartoon I just described was. “far Side” cartoon by Gary Larson who pumped out cartoons like this  for about 15 years and  you can go to the far side. Web page to find more... but back to acceptance —another of my favorite. far Side. Cartoons is a field full of sheep with one brave sheep standing up in the middle of the flock saying “wait a minute we don’t have to be sheep”—so that makes me think that  no matter the circumstances  one can start working  for changes that bring a life in line with values reflecting the search for peace and joy.   Now of course it’s not only Doc Holiday’s birthday it is the birthday of Gary Larson and they both literally brought. Smiles to my face and reframed my entire week because the  things that had created frowns were in fact circumstances that I could not control and maybe wouldn’t if I could.   

so maybe I’ll look at the far side of things more often and understand  that circumstance impact  peace and joy, however they are quite temporary in almost all cases.   

So to close out ember you don’t have to be seep—p