Signs, Signs, everywhere a sign…..
Several months back as I started to have a rather intense reawakening to some things in life, I realized that this line from the song is a true everyday occurrence. I do believe that you have to be open to seeing certain things in your world in order to catch them because they can be very very small unnoticeable if you are in fact caught up in the daily stuff. The moments that happens – when you have the epiphanies – are worth their spiritual weight in gold. And they are far too rare.
So these signs can be as obvious as a perfectly worded physical sign that pops up at the perfect moment and the readability of its message spackles your very soul with “the feels”, and it can also be other situations that come up and that are too easily interpreted to mean a signal to you. I think our brains and hearts work that way – they will use the world around us to delivery necessary messages when we’re either about to do something stupid or drastically wrong. Think about it – how many times in your life when you’ve made a mistake have you turned around later and said: “I KNEW I shouldn’t have done that.” There were signs, more than likely, and you just didn’t see them because you couldn’t interpret them at the time. For those instances, we should be learning lessons and guidance and not beating ourselves up. To do so is counterproductive to the entire picture of personal and human progression, yet we fall into that trap too, or at least, many of us do.
That feeling can trap you for years and, depending on the severeness of the issue, it can consume for some people. Sometimes for a lifetime, and sometimes where all you can think about is “escape”. Ten years ago I felt in the worst possible place a human can be, and I’ve been extremely down for the last few weeks due to stress, the combination of a few intense things in my life, and I would be lying if I said that thought hadn’t entered my mind recently. Two particular nights it was really bad, and I despised the moments the thoughts hit me. What I walked away from the emotional intensity of it was that I realized the growth that had happened in the last decade. But let me tell you what did it; why I’m able to still write this today.
After the thought had hit me a second strong time, I actually did see a few signs of things popping up around me. For instance, a week ago I was at Walmart – and on one of the bad days – with my headphones on inside the store, because I truly did not feel like talking to anyone. I had been in there about 15 minutes and was near the paint area, and I overheard a frustrated woman saying “I don’t care about mixed paint. I just want the dropcloths. Where are the dropcloths?”. She had begun walking away with an elderly associate clerk, and they were just “heading” toward the paint area – he did not know where they were either. I’d bought some from that very store in the last 6 months, so I slipped my headphones off, and said: “They’re right down that aisle near the back wall.” The woman turned around, saw I was addressing them, and pointed away. “That wall?” We didn’t look there.” I said yes, and started to slip my earbuds back in – and the man, a total stranger to me turned around and instead of just “Thanks” he said “We’re glad you’re here. Thanks!”.
Now…while that can surely be attributed to pointing them in the right direction, anything more than a “Thanks!” seemed odd to me, and the choice of words even more so. Coincidence? Maybe, but it sure was a welcoming phrase – and a jolting on – on a day when I was thinking quite the opposite. The interaction literally shifted gears for me.
During the next week – this past week – as I came out of that funk, I saw a few other things. Two friends lost their mothers within a day of each other, the news of another but previous friend passing, and then a story of a woman whose son had taken his life earlier in the year, at a very young age, just broke my heart back into being aware again, fully. I was already there, but had also seen my counselor today – we talked about the issue but certainly nothing about signs – and I realized that as I also rejoined a spiritual angle of my life that I’ve been ignoring for a while during this past week, my blinders were starting to come off again and there was a reason that I did not go down that route again…and my sadness for the friends was overwhelming of course. I must watch and obey those signs and I still feel like I have a mission here to help others do the same thing. Never thought I could save the world, never tried, but if anyone who reads this stuff ever wonders “should I pay attention?” and it stops them from leaving then, yes, it’s all worth the reveals.
From time to time people act oddly around me – as if my “ever-effusive emotions” are frightening or strange, and I like to think “maybe you’re the one who’s strange.” – as if being an emotional soul is a reason to be wary of someone. What I find I tend to trust more is someone who does show their emotions – no guesswork on how someone is feeling – and just goes forward happily or discusses things when they need to be. Sometimes these qualities are difficult to find or elicit. As I get older I find the ability to wade around to find the fish is less and less enthralling than it was in my 20’s. We should never be afraid of emotion – it is truly the one thing that weaves us all together. In the long run it may have been my realization that there’s a reason to have and experience all this, and as I continue working on the album lyrics and song development, I want to be more open to perhaps see these signs – and definitely hear – these stories from within my own world…. this was the universe telling me it is not okay for me to go… work isn’t done.
I just happened to see the signs.