Having New Eyes

While I was at work the other day I went into the main office to fill out a sheet for overtime hours I had worked and the calendar on the wall caught my eye because it has a quote for the month of March that holds very deep meaning for me. I have now seen this quote appear in my life a total of three times and I'm going to view this third time as a charm since it has appeared in the month of March. In some ways, I do view this quote as a lucky charm for how it has positively affected my perspective as I look over the landscape of the life I have lived thus far. 

Calendar in the office at work

The quote is by Marcel Proust who was a French writer in the early 1900s. The first time his quote appeared in my life was when I was a kid. It appeared on the memory book my Grandma Dorie had given me. As a child, though, I don't think I really soaked in the wisdom of this quote because in 2011, when I rediscoverd this memory book, it felt as though I was reading it for the first time. I didn't remember this quote being on the cover at all, but I did remember the image. It really wasn't until 2011 that its wisdom really struck a chord in me and I fully understood its meaning. 

The second time this quote appeared in my life was during a time when I was truly feeling as though I was seeing my life through "new eyes." When I saw this quote appear in my life again it was like I felt it had come alive and was speaking directly to me. It was truly quite profound. I had experienced a very powerful awakening on multiple levels in my life. My body, mind, and spirit had seemed to finally be beginning to heal after many years of suffering from health issues, chronic negative thought patterns, and having an overall negative perspective about life which stemmed from not feeling well most days. The second time the quote arose in my life was also at work, but a different cleaning job I had at the time. It appeared in a company-made calendar for a business that I used to clean and each month featured a picture one of the employees had taken.The photo that was paired with Marcel Proust's wisdom is of cottonwood tree roots. I have posted it below. The employee who had taken this photo had explained that with "new eyes" one would be able to see the beauty of the roots. I think that is wonderful. It really paints a picture of perspective. 

I deeply pondered how I felt seeing the quote recently for the third time and it felt like I had climbed many mountains, barely surviving some of them, which means I have changed and grown quite a bit since seeing it last. For one thing, when I had discovered the quote for the second time I had just met the guy who became my first true love. I saw so much beauty in the way we met which was at work where this calendar in the above picture came from. But where we really connected in a powerful way was at a concert. He was there for the opening band and I was there to listen to the headliner. As I look back I still smile about how so many things felt like a dream come true in our relationship and yet I also feel a lot of pain thinking about how our relationship quickly turned into a nightmare. Before I knew it, about 2 years into our relationship, we broke up, on an ocean voyage to Alaska. I still loved him but he shared that he did not love me. My heart broke with such power I had never felt before and I felt destroyed. I wasn't sure if I could heal from the pain of being rejected by someone I loved so deeply, but I am now seeing things more clearly with "new eyes" and have a better perspective about why our break up was for the best. Today I am feeling much of me has healed and I am still on the voyage toward healing. I have been trying to see more clearly why our relationship did not work out and I have learned to see that it was mainly because our hearts were going in different directions. The other day I stumbled across a quote by a different French author, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, that struck a chord in me and offers wisdom about how I may be able to better recognize when I have found a good match in a partner: