Obstacles and Surprises


 

Thursday afternoon, just before shutting down my work computer, I got an email from my arborist. His crew was going to have time to take out a few trees that he had been unable to finish cutting down earlier this year. I thought: fantastic! He let me know the crew would be here at 9am. Okay, I was a little surprised, but still excited. 

Six am and the backup beeping of a tractor-trailer outside my bedroom window shocked me awake. Even my neighbor, the former excavator, wouldn't start moving heavy equipment at 6am. Bleary-eyed, I went outside to confirm that this crew was in fact going to repair our little rural road. Today. 

Well, that was fine. I needed to head into town to go to the doctor's office and have some blood drawn. Blasted off a little after 7am and arrived a half hour later, none the worse for wear. No one was waiting, so I was quickly called to the front desk. The usual pleasantries were exchanged: name, DOB, referring doctor, was I fasting, etc. The nurse lets me know that there's no record of a blood draw request from my doctor. Surprise number three. No worries, I will just call the doctor and get it straightened out. Surprise! Their office doesn't open until 8am.... which means I need to wait half an hour just to talk to someone at the office. Sigh.

You can see the obstacles lining up like surrealistic dominoes. Another nurse points out some computer detail to the nurse who had been helping me and all of suddent they could find the blood draw Rx. Surprise. Not five minutes later the blood was drawn and I was out the door. Surprise!

Made it home in great time, and expected I would beat the arborists. Instead, I was surprised to find over a dozen tractor trailers filled with asphalt and gravel lining my street. And as I made my way towards my now-very-blocked-driveway, saw that the arborists had managed to get both their trucks into my driveway. Surprise and more surprise. Nowhere to park, I borrowed a spot in my neighbor's driveway and called him to let him know... just so he wasn't surprised.

Ambled back over to my yard where the tree crew was fully set up, big crane with a grappling claw and chainsaw attached, ready to go. The huge chipper was hooked up to the other truck, just waiting to consume big dead logs. 

Like a chorus of cicadas and tanks and lawnmowers and waterfalls all rolled into one... all the engines started up almost simultaneously! Half a dozen huge tractor-trailers revved up their big diesel engines. The arborist's chainsaw jumped to life and the chipper filled in the middle range.  Surprise!

It wasn't quite nine am. 




By 1pm, everyone was gone and the yard was silent. The road crew had moved on down the road, past the bend, and out of sight. The tree crew was off to job number two for the day. The fresh asphalt smelled awful. The freshly cut woodchips smelled fantastic. The change in the skyline of our backyard was a heck of a surprise. And now we had a new pile of woodchips! Surprise!


Sedum 'Thunderhead' and a bee

All of which is to say... sometimes your day is filled with obstacles. Sometimes surprises. Sometimes it is just full. I used to think there was some kind of merit to being stoic and positive. I guess that probably lead to a lot of childhood traumas. Life is good, dammit! Then, for a long while, the glass was definitely half-empty. Life sucked. 

What's different now? Well, I think I can feel the surprise. And ideally, separate that feeling from other expectations. Good and bad become less relevant. More of a hmm. That's interesting. Huh? Well, okay. 

When I was a kid, obstacles were meant to be scrambled over. As I got older it got harder and harder to go over, so I would go around. Now I am starting to realize it might not be an obstacle at all, but maybe just an opportunity to go to the mailbox. Surprise! In the mailbox was a packed full of iris seeds from SIGNA! 



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