Monday, March 14, 2016

Over, And Under, And Through

I don't know how many among my readers have seen the Grover song "Over, Under, and Through." Consisting largely of the repeated lyric "Around, around, around, around. Over, and under, and through," it is one of those pieces of Sesame Street genius that teaches a lesson (in this case, prepositions), and leaves you laughing all the way. Furry Grover (one of my personal favorites) navigates all sorts of paths, each having a best way to go, and therefore, a best preposition. Along the way, we also realize that some paths can have multiple reasonable approaches, and that is what brought the song to mind today.
 

Today, I began what most people consider "a day" having just finished an overnight shift. Often, my day would then continue with a nap, and a few hours later, I might feel even with the members of the world who had actually slept all night. But a nap was not to be. There was too much to be done to stop for the hours a nap would take, so before I knew it, I was barreling THROUGH. I couldn't really get AROUND IT. If I stopped, I would be UNDER the gun to be where I needed to be, and the the requirements of the day simply demanded that I get OVER my tiredness and just move on. Consequently, I found myself alternating between kind of sleepwalking through the streets and drifting on and off buses and careening through conversations and obstacles and decisions, not unlike Grover, who, by the end of the song, is navigating his path pretty quickly (though a bit recklessly), and in all sorts of different ways.
 

Perhaps next time, the nap would be the smarter choice. Yet, when we, like Grover, make it work in all kinds of different ways, we learn that we are capable of a bit more than we thought. We are more creative problem-solvers than we ever imagined. And we are successful navigators, whether we are sporting furry blue arms or the clothes we've been wearing all night.
 

We generally can manage more than we think, even when our circumstances feel beyond us. We can manage, that is, as long as we are sometimes willing to go "around, around, around, around, over and under and through."

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