It’s a beautiful morning, I wake up with my dogs cuddling me on either side to the sound of my mother’s voice, “You better get up and get ready to head back home. I have tea, brown rice and greens waiting for you downstairs”. No I’m not 12 years old, but the warm sensation of visiting mom’s house and having home cooked food without your own effort, not to mention I am fortunate enough to have a “macro mom”, always manages to conjure up the cuddly feelings of childhood. I was visiting home (yep, good ‘ol New Jersey) from where I currently reside (Washington, DC) because a childhood friend and her husband just arrived home form the hospital with their newborn son. This is a first out of our group of friends. It was a really nice weekend and a nice last morning of it.
I was heading out early for brunch plans with my vegan-friendly girlfriends at the Muse Café of the Cochran Gallery in DC for 12:30pm. I gathered my things. I packed the car with some new cooking accessories including a new small cast iron pan, a stir-fry friendly pot, some home cooked whole food and some random ingredients (you know, just normal things like dried daikon radish and burdock root, ha!). I said goodbye to the dogs (oh and my wonderful mother) and headed out. Just about 1 mile en route and before I had time to react – my car hit a huge pothole. The kind you know can’t be good, but you live in denial for the next few minutes. I didn’t hear or feel anything unusual after but pulled over to check the tire. It seemed damage free so I hit the road with a sigh of relief. It wasn’t until about 5 or 6 soulful car jam sessions to the radio and 25miles later that I noticed the oh so comforting (insert sarcastic grunt here) sign of (!) light up on my dashboard came up. My thoughts exactly, “!”. You nailed it with that symbol, Toyota. Of course it popped on just in time, in other words about 30 seconds after I passed a rest area on the turnpike, so I got off at the next rest stop about 10 minutes later. The pressure gage indeed measured about 10lbs lower in the front right tire the inside rim (sneaky little pothole), only visible upon removal of the tire, had been damaged. Well that just confirmed that I wouldn’t be making brunch and I’d be even lucky to make it to DC at all today.
A really sweet service attendant helped me pop on the donut spare while I phoned my DC girlfriends that I had no choice, but to head back to my mom’s to figure the whole thing out.
While I was driving a painfully slow 40mph in the right lane the entire 32 or so miles home, I had some thinking time. I usually am someone who tries to make lemonade (or more like lemon tahini dressing) out of lemons so I spent the thinking time preparing my mental juicer. In the process, a few thoughts squeezed out. So, I’ve just started this really pure nutritional commitment (notice I refrain from the word diet, but that’s another blog entry waiting to happen), and a full-fledged buffet brunch probably wasn’t conducive to keeping within all the limits. Further, my weakness for vegan French toast would surely have kicked in yielding to focus on suppressing my craving and therefore, decreased attention to the lovely company of my girlfriends, which, after all, was one of the more important purposes of the brunch gathering. Now, that’s if I was able to avoid giving in to the craving, which would have otherwise diffused thoughts of guilt into my brain space instead. As I kept chugging along at my barely 40mph, cars and trucks one after another struggling to pass me, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of surrender. Whether surrender to the speed limit, the greater energy of the universe or the potholes of the road, surrender none-the-less.
In some crazy way is it possible that the universe, being I consider it some of the same grandiose energy that is Mother Nature, controls where the potholes are on the journey of life? We may not know they were put there with some purpose and we certainly may be too caught up in the frustration of the damage to think otherwise, but is it possible there’s a reason for pot holes beyond signs of regional climate and everyday traffic annoyance? Ok, maybe there is no true “reason for everything” as some claim, but if not, is it not fair to make my own reason? So I came home, lucky for just one more welcome greeting from my dogs, to a table set for lunch by wonderful macro mom, which included brown rice pasta and fresh broccoli with lemon tahini lemon dressing. Just after devouring, mindfully of course, my yummy lunch, I checked my email to find another girlfriend had to cancel and we were already set to reschedule for two Sundays from now. Thanks, universe, I’ll take it. So, I pose to you… is the tire half flat of half full?
