"A Default Position"

Most people change their email addresses, and most computers remember those addresses long after they have been ‘deleted’ from your contact list. Just the other day, I got caught again! Admittedly I wasn’t paying all that close attention to what I was doing. The email had been written, proofread and mulled over. Adding the address was a ‘no-brainer’. Several days later however I noticed one of those ‘Delivery Status Notification Status (Failure) ‘ messages and found to my chagrin that the computer had picked up an address long discarded in place of any of the current ones. So off the message went again along with a note of apology this time for my lack of attention the first time round. As I was silently berating myself for my inexcusable carelessness, I realized that my mind is very much like my computer in this regard.

Not long after this, my husband was reading a monthly publication and remarked that he ‘missed’ a certain column in it, one that hadn’t been there for over a year. For a moment, to him, that year had evaporated.

I remember well being given some devastating news and my very first reaction being that I wished I believed in a ‘sky god’ who would make everything alright! I was completely taken aback….how could I entertain this thought for even a moment?

Each of these three scenarios tell the same story, that both computers and humans have a default position. We accept it as ‘just one of those things that happen’ when our computer pulls up an old address out of nowhere and in fact we can be grateful for the ability to return to a ‘default’ position when we have inadvertently screwed something up!

Sometimes, for us too, being able to return to a ‘default’ position is necessary to get us through a traumatic event. The harm comes when the default position becomes the norm again for us and we refuse to move out of it.

I first started thinking about writing this blog about 6 months ago but never managed to get it on paper. This past week I experienced a personal crisis and realized, after the fact, that the need for the ‘sky god’ had never entered my consciousness. Depending on my own resources and accessing my community of friends and family, the crisis was met and handled.

Lest I think that my default position is no longer there, I noticed yesterday morning as I was approaching the hospital parking lot, my mind was saying "Please let me find a parking place! Please! Please!" (And BTW, I did!) So now I know that while the 'sky' god is still there sometimes, he isn't the there ALL the time - and that shows progress, at least to me. Will he ever be completely gone?

Does this mean that over time our default position can change? I hope so, because otherwise we are forever stuck in our past.

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