In the early hours of this morning, the universe woke me from a dream. The details of the dream elude me now, but the message was a whack over the head that I’m unlikely to forget for a very long time.
The line that woke me was this: ‘wake up and smell the bullshit.’ All I remember was that it was a woman’s voice that had declared it, and she was engaged in a conversation with a person that I couldn’t see. Upon hearing those words within the dream, I woke from my sleep. It was 2:00 am.
When a reasonable hour rolled around— time to wake for the day— I lay in bed and wondered about the dream. As I lay there pondering the absurdity of waking at the exact moment the dream girl had asked me to wake in order to ‘smell the bullshit,’ I continued to wonder. What bullshit was this dream girl asking me to wake up and smell? Right then, an epiphany arrived in my spiritual inbox, and it took the form of an ugly bucket of pegs I bought a long time ago. I bought that bucket for no other reason than to hold pegs.
But as I lay in bed it hit me: that bucket of pegs was just another reminder of a way of life I no longer choose. A time when I was living so far outside of the boundaries of who I authentically am, I couldn’t even see the ‘bullshit’ I’d accidentally mistaken as ‘truth’. At the time, I was heavily living according to everyone else’s template, which of course meant that I was living outside of the truth of who I really am. And as I continued to see the ugly bucket of pegs in my mind’s eye, I thought: what a wasted opportunity.
“Brooke, I heard the soft girl whisper. It is an old story you have been living within all these years: a story of limitation, a story of fear-based restrictions that no longer serve the life you are moving towards. In the old world, this was indeed just a bucket of pegs.
But it is time to accept that you no longer live in the world you once knew to be true. Yours is a world made of choice, of colour, of magic— and this means that you must no longer allow yourself to revert to thinking along conventional lines. Let others see only a bucket of pegs if they so choose. But you must always remember this: it is your right to see more. And it is your truth to see more.“
I instantly knew what the soft girl was telling me. In the case of the bucket of pegs— had I taken more time to connect fully with who I really am when it came time to choosing that bucket I’d be spending so much time with, I would have remembered that I am soothed by beautiful, soft colours. That I am creative. That I feel things, perhaps a little more than others, so I need to make sure that I surround myself with things that feel good to me.
Had I been more aware of these things about myself at the time, and brave enough to step beyond the conventional idea of what a bucket of pegs should look like, I might have chosen a different bucket. A bucket that wasn’t ‘made for pegs’ at all, but instead was beautiful, and also fully functional as far as a peg bucket might go. How completely full and beautiful the simple experience of hanging out the washing might have become for me. Gazing over at my beautiful little peg bucket as it hung on the line, feeling a little bit of lovely every time I picked a peg from it. How I might have smiled.
The wonderful news is: it’s not too late for me to see the ‘bullshit’ of my old ways because I’m not dead yet. And while I’m alive, I make a promise to myself that I will always drive towards the possibilities in order to arrive at my very best life.
Always and forever, I choose to do that.
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