Distractions abound. One split second of inattention can lead to disaster, whether it’s the roadside wildflowers that make me fail to notice the brake lights ahead of me or the glittery wings of a metallic beetle that keep me from realizing that everybody in my promenading party has walked on ahead without me and I don’t quite know where. Not such great and significant dramas in the grand scheme of things, these, but small indicators to remind me that things could have been so much worse if I hadn’t been so fortunate, and might be yet if I don’t learn from the nudges.
The best fortune in them is, of course, that I’m cautioned before the crack of doom. How much better to be alerted by noticing the swerve I had to make to avoid plowing into the slowed traffic, or by realizing I have to catch up with my strolling companions than that I actually caused a crash or hiked right off the trail into uncharted wilderness alone. A little jolt is an occasion for large thankfulness.
That’s how I travel through life, bumbling along its unmapped corridors with my faulty personal GPS and my avid, easily attracted magpie eye. I bump into life as much as I take a route through it. I’m just relieved to have lived this long without disappearing down any of an infinite number of rabbit holes and being lost forever in the warrens, tripping in them obliviously only because I was too mesmerized by nonessential Other Things along the way.
Art-Colored Glasses 
This sounds all too familiar!! And it seems the older I get, the more distractions attract me. Keep safe!
Tig, it’s you and Heather who need Godspeed. 🙂 Safe travels to us all! But let us never lack for exciting diversions anyhow. 😉
It seems like this could be a common thing among us. I too get far to distracted with this and that so that I am not paying attention to that and this and the other 🙂
After all, where do our most outstanding ideas and inventions originate? Why, they often spring from the sudden notice of a random (and I think you *do* know what I mean by *that*!) thing that wasn’t part of the main plan in the first place. I am so glad to embrace the good in my diversions; it’s just that I need to temper that affection with sensibility perhaps a tiny bit more often than I do. 😉
xoxo
sorry, but I wonder sometimes if it isn’t the echo of the crack of doom that I hear thundering in my ears all the time, and then I realize most people just call it tinnitus … how distracting! 🙂
Tinnitus, that horrid thing! I think it’s pretty much the equivalent of having some wicked imp perch on one’s shoulder and whisper incessant annoyances. I’m a touch over-sensitive to noise as it is, and even earplugs sometimes merely focus my attention on my pulse and the sounds of my teeth clicking, my breathing patterns, you-name-it internal mini-sounds, so I can’t imagine if those or other sounds became truly perpetual companions day and night. Maybe doom doesn’t require high volume, just incessancy. I hope you have times of respite!! 🙂
xo
“Ooooh, SHINY!”
Most common phrase in my life… 😉
Hmmm…have you by any chance seen Firefly? Shiny! 😀 We magpies have to stick together, no matter what. Others cannot comprehend the significance of the attraction we have to twinkly and glittery and reflective things, but it’s their loss. 😉
Let’s put it this way: A tough gal around here is said to be “Channeling her inner Zoe”… 🙂
😀 😀 😀