I had the post-holidays blues today. This condition typically leaves me feeling lethargic, pessimistic and, frankly, a little irritable. Regardless, I decided to shake off these harbingers of inactivity and jump start 2012 by turning my attention to an essay that I have been studiously (ha!) avoiding throughout the yuletide. I need to submit an outline in the next couple of weeks, and so I decided that I would feel infinitely better about myself if I could just gather together the relevant papers, shuffle them about, perhaps type a quote or two into google docs and watch my attitude miraculously shift from self-reproach to self-satisfaction in a matter of moments.
I quickly locate my textbook right where it should be inside my bookbag. A-ha. But…where are the other papers? Dazedly, I look about my room for the all-important “handouts”—photocopied introductions by learned types that are highly valuable (to me), difficult to come by (their loss involves empty hours by the photocopier) and pages which I have carefully kept with the textbook for these past weeks (er, on the stairs). I love the numerous and delightfully indecipherable marginal notes, emphatic underlinings and abundant exclamation marks throughout, all courtesy of my wise and brilliant instructor who has carefully copied these tomes from his own collection and passed them along.
I must pause to say that isn’t really like me to lose things, but of course it does happen sometimes, and it was the holiday season after all, complete with bags and boxes and much coming and going. Furthermore, I am—admittedly—a ruthless tidier and since I couldn’t find the papers anywhere, I began to consider—with rising terror—that I must have recycled them (somehow) along with the holiday gift wrap and general mess. The dawning of this thought brought a landslide of self-recrimination and with it, a generalized feeling of woe (see opening paragraph).
Having exhausted all avenues of search, and feeling a little hopeless, I did something rather peculiar. I lay down on the bedroom floor on my back. I’m not exactly sure why, but it seemed the right thing to do. As I did so, I rolled my head to the right, and looked absently at the radiator that runs along the front of the room under the window. The window seat atop is a popular resting place for our lunatic cat, as it offers a marvellous vantage point from which to survey the squirrels as they perform acrobatics in the tree. I looked again at the radiator, and thought I caught sight of something white, wedged between the wall and rad. I scrambled to my feet and groped behind the radiator for a second or two. My persistance was rewarded: I pulled out page after page of the missing Ferenczi handouts which my cat had presumably knocked there in one of his playful bouts of gravity-testing. (He can be trusted to knock virtually any item from the top of a dresser, table or chair, watching closely as he does so, and seeming only to be interested in proving to himself that it will, in fact, fall to the floor.) I was thrilled: no need to track down equally-weary classmates for the missing material, and I was free to banish all remorseful thoughts on my carelessness. Indeed, joy!
As I happily organized my notes (I had abandoned any thought of doing any real work on the essay today) I decided I had unintentionally enacted a rather important life lesson.
When you have a problem, try another perspective.
Even if it means lying on the floor.
