Pay Attention To Small Accidents
Pay Attention To Small Accidents
How A Glass Breaking Showed Me The Truth
Today I whacked my elbow. The shooting pain surprised me. It’s been a long time since I whacked my elbow on something. I forgot how bad it can hurt. It overwhelmed me for a moment. Shortly after, I whacked it again. Even harder. The first hit came from my desk. The second from the bathroom counter.
The shock of the second whack served as an alarm. It put me on alert. It made me ask, “What is going on?”
I stopped and took a snapshot of my mental goings on: my thoughts and feelings. I scanned them like an error seeker. Then analyzed them.
I started to do this stop-snapshot-scan mind exercise several years ago after a bizarrely feeling double accident.
I buy Voss water because it comes in a glass bottle. I like drinking from glass. To buy a glass water bottle by itself costs more than buying water in a glass bottle. Go figure. So why not just buy the water in the glass bottle then re-use the bottle? That is what I do. I have at least 5 glass Voss bottles at home at all times.
I was sitting on the sofa holding my Voss water bottle. Then it freakishly fell out of my hand and shattered on the parquet floor. I say freakishly because I don’t remember letting go. I am not the kind of person who breaks stuff. Rarely do I break a glass or dish.
“That is what you get for using glass bottles.” You may say.
Fair enough.
I carefully picked up the pieces. A few minutes later, a second glass bottle fell out of my hand and shattered. A feeling of surrealness and creepiness accompanied the second shattering. It had such an effect on me that I stopped and asked myself whether this is a sign.
Do you know what I was thinking about when the first glass shattered?
I was contemplating giving a person who betrayed me a second chance. The contemplation continued as I picked up the broken pieces. “But maybe it was a misunderstanding. Maybe he didn’t really mean it.”
Cleaning made me thirsty. This is when I picked up the second Voss bottle. Instantly it fell out of my hand. The shattering was worse this time because I was standing and not sitting. The glass had further to fall. Pieces flew across the parquet floor and across the kitchen. Some wedged themselves permanently in nooks under the stove. This got my attention.
“Is this a warning?”
When The Physical Reflects The Mental
If you pay attention there appears a connection between your environment, physical actions and mental goings on.
In my early twenties, a time of great self experimentation, I wrote my dreams out every day. The more I wrote, the more of my dreams I remembered. The more I remembered, the more I wrote. Notebooks filled up fast. The more enthused I felt the tighter I held the pen. A callus developed on my middle finger.
A teacher once told me that there is an acupressure point right on the tip of your middle finger that corresponds to the brain. When pressed it helps you concentrate. I read a paper suggesting that the human fascia network may be the physical substrate represented by the meridians. Maybe all that pressing facilitated further thought flow.
I started to notice that the dreams reflected reality. Usually in somewhat of a distorted or symbolical way, but sometimes clearly and obviously. I once dreamt of a salad in a green bowl standing in the fridge. Later that evening I opened the fridge and there stood a salad in a green bowl. It looked exactly like in the dream — right down to the shredded feta on a tomato wedge.
“Probably your mom made it.”
Yes indeed she did.
“So what makes it remarkable?”
It is seldom that my mom made salad. The green bowl was new. Somehow my mind took in everything around me and rendered an image in my mind that perfectly represented an actual physical manifestation.
The most remarkable thing for me was the feeling that accompanied it. A déjà vu like strangeness. Like living in a Dali painting but with feelings and thoughts. Or like being in an Ingmar Bergman film. The strange feeling put me on alert and resulted in me noticing other incidences of dream elements appearing in wakened life.
In one symbolical dream a friend closed the door in my face. In real life she closed the door on our friendship.
Writing the dreams helped me see the symbiosis between the mental and the physical. Eventually writing the dreams got exhausting and I stopped.
The glass shattering the second time evoked the same strange feeling. I recognized that I am picking up shards of glass while picking up pieces of my broken heart. The thought of giving this person another chance to break me created a disturbance. The disturbance resonated and manifested in the physical world where I can see it. Inner discordance creates outer disturbance. The outer disturbance is the warning.
What Happens When You Don’t Heed The Warning?
Accidents can get bigger and louder or you simply end up dealing with the consequences of whatever warning you didn’t heed. Accidents are themselves consequences, but they are like pre-consequences that prognosticate the ultimate consequence.
I heeded the warning of the broken Voss bottle. I did not let him back in.
So What About The Elbow Whacking?
I was rehashing an unpleasant conversation with a woman I had. I was thinking of witty retorts and what I would say to her next time. In my mind I got quite mean.
I was being spiteful. I wrote an article here about the consequences of spite, but here I was going on. In the middle of these thoughts I whacked my elbow. But did I stop? No. I kept on. Then bang, again. I stopped after the second whacking just like after the second glass breaking. It took two hits to get my attention.
As I reflected I admitted the futility of the mean words echoing through my mind. They were creating negative energy and lowering my vibe. Furthermore what good would saying them do? Chances are these words would make an unpleasant situation worse.
I decided to meditate and let the mean words go.
Stop Snapshot Scan
Pay attention to small accidents: A toe stubbing, a shirt getting stuck on a knob, or an object breaking. Also pay attention to near misses. Take a deep breath and stop. Take a snapshot of your mental state and look at it. Look at what you were contemplating and feeling at the moment of the accident.
Pay particular attention to incidences that are accompanied by a strange surreal feeling. That feeling signals congruence between worlds or spheres of existence. It gives you a sneak peek behind the scenes. There may be a warning or a happy synchronicity.
If you want to get a feel for this stuff I suggest keeping a dream journal for a while. You can also take regular snapshots of your mental states. We learn and upgrade ourselves be observing ourselves.
In this piece I shared a symbolic dream that woke me up and served as a catalyst for a dark night of the soul. Check it out:
Thank you for being here.
I had a repeating dream of flying up a street where houses had much larger amounts of land than the lots I was raised with in the city, there was a short crooked fence at one house . Twenty years later after unexpectedly having moved to several different states I moved to a house on 5 acres. The other homes had 10 to 20 acres. One house down the street had that crooked fence.