Catching "Merveilles et Miracles" in Everyday Life

Because marvels and miracles are everywhere...even in an "unremarkable" life

Nov 27, 2021

How can it be that I really dislike my job while I so treasure the experience of the unique conglomeration of the people and situations I am experiencing?

Because I am aware of two things at the same time:

(1) My emotional response - ick! no! hate this! - and;

(2) The preciousness of the days of my life and the unrepeatability of its weird and wild reality.

I don’t get a do-over. And I don’t want to continue to say, “I’ll wait until later to be happy. or even just ‘okay’.” I am invested in being happy, “okay”:, delirious, flamboyantly weird, whatever, NOW.

So, the characters that I meet, work with, communicate with, grow with and argue with are unique and will always be unique in my life, and I in theirs, and I don’t want to miss it!

I spent a lot of years fighting myself to choose either one or the other, y’know? But it’s clear now that the pathway to acceptance of life as it is is not a neat and tidy one - at least not for this woman.

She’s too much in love with letting herself off the “should” hooks so she can live more fully while she’s on the planet.

It’s a “goodbye, good girl” thing.

So…A Midwestern Marvel

Yesterday, one of the customers who picked up one of my phone calls was a young man named Matthew who lives out in California. Nice guy. Not interested in buying anything from us but internet because he needs flexibility. He goes back and forth between California and … Tokyo, Japan.

Whoa, I said to him. That’s seriously cool! I was thinking maybe he teaches English, but I said, “So you must be a jazz singer over there,” because I had heard years ago that the Japanese love American jazz singers over there and I thought calling him a jazz singer would pump him up more than being called an English teacher…

Joke’s on me! He tells me he’s a Music Producer and Writer for some of the top pop Japanese singers! NEAT! LOVE IT!

So I told him I used to sing jazz, and he said, “Ooh, I love jazz! There’s some really interesting Japanese jazz music you should listen to: Anime Cowboy Bebop Music. “

Sorry…what?

And he also says I should listen to 80's Japanese City Pop on YouTube. “You’re gonna fall in love with it!” he said. For some reason, the Japanese have decided that our musical 80’s vibe is worthy of imitation.

Oh. My. Gawd. Is that hilarious or what?

I love 80’s music, yes, but really? That’s the decade they fell in love with? That’s fairly epic.

I haven’t listened yet, but obviously I wrote it down and I’m gonna check it out today because I’m getting more curious about Japan and its musical openness. When I worked at School of Rock for about 6 months I taught singing to an emotionally traumatized 14 year old student. She introduced me to anime music - I had heard of anime, but who knew anime had frickin’ popular theme songs??? So for 3 months we sang this song together - yes, in Japanese…

It stuck with me. (Never have watched the show, though…) Imagine singing this every week for 3 months…

But this story gets even better.

Matthew tells me that his father was a dancer back in the 1980’s. When he moved out to L.A., he was a back-up dancer for - wait for it! - Michael Jackson, and Paula Abdul… He was in the Smooth Criminal video…

WHAT?

Beyond seriously cool!

And then it all gets “marvelous” when the guy tells me that his father is originally from … Cincinnati.

STOP IT! WHAT?

Said his dad - last name Columbus - moved out to L.A. after graduating high school, and he still lives there. But he grew up and went to high school here - some high school with “hill” in the name? I’m like, “Did he go to Walnut Hills????”, where I went. But he doesn’t think so. I don’t care - he grew up here in Cincinnati! What are the freakin’ CHANCES???

See, things like this - tidbits of information, stumbling over a bit of informational, interpersonal gold and utterly unexpected connectivity - convinces me that life is not quite as random and fractured as I might sometimes feel. And THAT makes my freakin’ DAY! If I am currently in this crazy call center, something good should happen, dammit!

And it did.

And Then There’s “Luck”…and the Miraculous

In my ongoing quest NOT to “quest” but instead to actively and every day receive and live and radiate the beauty of this ephemeral thing we call life, I wonder about the word “miracle” and the word “luck”.

Why do we limit “miracles” to something like walking on water. I mean, yes, that’s impressive and wow-worthy - well done, Lord! - but aren’t you just as miraculous? And I don’t mean this in the abstract, but holy shit how did you come to be here, and how did you come to be you, and OMG this entire panoply of interconnected interaction and your unique part in it…

I find that miraculous. It’s subtle, I’ll grant you, but it’s miraculous AF.

‘Tis the season to think on this particular concept because it’s time to watch - yet again - It’s a Wonderful Life.

“Don’tcha see, George? You really had a wonderful life!”

(You gotta love Clarence the Angel, don’tcha?)

Anyway, what about “luck”? And “karma”? There are times in one’s life that can absolutely, deeply, profoundly SUCK. And for long periods of time. For real.

But if we are to live lives in which we stop obeying the given “truths” of humanhood, we suddenly get some fascinating choices which kind of stick-it to things like bad luck and bad karma.

The given “truths” of bad luck that we tend to lean on are thoughts, actually, that range from “God hates me” to “I must have done something seriously shitty to merit this!” to “This is happening to teach me a lesson” and “Everything happens for a reason”, to the Buddhist tenet, “Life is suffering.”

Then there are our bad luck social “truths” of how “necessary” and “appropriate” it is to hide one’s natural feelings from others and just seem “okay”. God forbid we should show that we’re angry, hurt, confused, depressed… (We kinda do need to, though. As a whole, we humans are just not trained in how to deal with others’ emotions - or our own, come to that! It’s a crap situation, really. We need to change that.)

I know it feels great to have a “reason” for what is happening, but looking for that reason always got me into trouble! I find that bad “luck” gets a reaaaalllly interesting makeover when some of the time we spend in our hell hole experience is dedicated to the empowering and deepening pursuits of finding something to appreciate while we’re there - even a small thing - and…taking off the “hair shirt”.

Are you better than I am at sending out cards at holiday time? If so, this is one of my all-time favorites, because women always embrace the darkness to birth the light.

Set of 10 cards [get up to 60% off with code “CYBER5”]

APPRECIATION: Instead of marinating in a state of profound brooding while sitting on the bus on my way to work during the time I was sans-homestead - wondering if this was the way I would spend the rest of my life - I of course did brood-and-wonder, and I simultaneously looked around me and started either appreciating or in some cases speaking with some fascinating people!

PENANCE: In olden times, penance was done by wearing a shirt made of goat hair. Lovely…ugh.

I have found that believing that something is being “done to” me - even by the divine - is a sneaky way to be really mean to myself - to do some kind of weird, emotional hair-shirt-like penance.

When I stop giving 100% of my attention to the crap (no small feat, by the way) and take the thing that is happening and just say “okay, here I fecking am, dammit!”, and then choose to sprinkle in a different approach and outlook about it, something truly miraculous does in fact happen.

I find that my life has meaning again, and I find that I have the ability and, yes, the power to fill my own life with meaning. Even more miraculous is that when I do that, the divine that I may have been praying to without any seeming response suddenly shows up in amazing ways that I wasn’t praying for but oh-so-badly needed in order to make that shit time less shitty!

I find that my options multiply! Instead of looking at my bad karmic situation and saying, “Ohmygod, I’m so fucked”, I say, “Ohmygod, I’m so fucked…Now, what ways am I not seeing that could help me get UNfucked?” And - MIRACULOUSLY- I start to see them, receive them, wow! Some light in the darkness. Yes, thank you!

I currently work in a call center. What. The. Feck??????? I also support the individuals that I call. I respond to them, and they to me, and we make our lives better. And that’s what it’s all about as far as I’m concerned, people, because certainly the immanent quality of our lives does not depend on whether or not we buy a streaming service or cable…

But it certainly does - yes indeed! - depend on our quality of life, and how we treat ourselves and one another.

So, is it unlucky that I work in a call center (hell yes!) or is it a cool opportunity to have experiences I would never otherwise have (hell yes!).

Well, damn…it’s both.

Welcome to earth.

And by the way, speaking of things that bring both joy and pain, welcome to the holidays!