Do you remember...

those pictures that you had to stare at until your eyes almost crossed in order to see a hidden picture?  How like life, huh?  People look one way until you observe them for a long time or until you really see them and then you find out they are someone else entirely or perhaps you're seeing what was there all along.  What the hell am I talking about?  Let me see if I can bring it into focus.

I think sometimes we confuse comfort and consistency with boredom and apathy.  Books and movies lead us to believe that every day should be an adventure.  Carpe Diem, right?  But who really can do that?  Seize every single day?  Perhaps independently wealthy retired folks can.  They have the time and money to make every day whatever they want it to be.  I'd volunteer to be a test subject to prove that theory right.  I wonder, even to someone in the best position possible to enjoy it, if life sometimes feels like one big old rut.  (Not the deer kind, pervs.)

I've been known to confuse exciting for happiness.  Hell, I've been known to confuse different for happiness.  Just feeling something that I haven't felt the past 100 days in a row, even if everyone else can see it's bad for me, seems really really good.  I think people, me included, do this a lot in relationships.  You meet a new friend or potential suitor and everything is new.  It's all a big mystery, questions to be asked and answered.  You go new places and try new things.  You start ignoring the sameness around  you thinking you've found greener grass. The people you've had in your life forever seem less shiny and vibrant.  The shorthand you've used to communicate with them no longer feels comfortable, it feels lazy.  So you focus mostly on the new and begin to see what you think are all kinds of flaws and frayed edges and blandness of the old.

Then one day you wake up and realize the new is now the same.  And you notice that because there's something else new on the horizon.  I bet you can name people who do this.  Maybe it's you?  Or me.  They jump relationships and beds and cars and jobs because they are chasing that initial high that change gives them.  It's one thing to seize today, it's another thing entirely to do it at the cost of losing what you had already established as good.

Think about this, how blah is it to have to clean your house?  Laundry that never ends, wiping up spills.  Now think about how good it feels after weeks of ballgames and weddings and plans, plans, plans to have a Saturday where you wash your bed linens and clean your shower and actually catch up on laundry.  That feeling of just being in your space with your things and your regular old boring people who don't seem to care if you're wearing the same pajama pants you slept in last night.  The comfort you feel walking into your house after a vacation and it smelling familiar.  Even if you're a go-er and a do-er and you love that, when you finally have a chance to just be in the quiet part of your life, it feels good for at least a few seconds before you're off to something new.

Every second of The Wizard of Oz builds towards a realization that familiar and safe are good words.  That doing something new and different can be the most amazing adventure ever, bringing you new friends, stories and joy.  But it can also get you lost and attacked by winged monkeys.  Now, I'm not saying that in your own way you shouldn't go out there and look for your Emerald City.  I'm not saying that you shouldn't ever change or search for different or experience something unlike anything you've done before.  I do have a brain and a heart and some courage after all.  (Sick of the W of O references yet?) 

I'd probably start making dolls out of my own hair if every day was the same as the hundreds stretching out behind me.  What I am suggesting is that you take a minute and go back to looking at the original picture and remember why you loved it so much to begin with.  Because in the end, what keeps the hell fresh is having ordinary hell to compare it to.