Friday, May 6, 2011

Little moments of clarified insanity....

You probably know what I'm talking about. The moment that happens seconds before you crash your car, and all you can think about is whether you are wearing clean underwear.(If you were before, you won't be after...so what does it matter anyway?) Or the moment you take your boy infant's diaper off and you see him screw up his face and aim the pee gun right at your face. And especially the moment directly following a very dirty word you uttered in front of your impressionable mimicking toddler. (And now will spend the next 6 months working to rid from her impressive vocabulary.)

I have a term I like to use to describe these moments: Bursts of Clarified Insanity. For just a moment, the world is clear, and your brain finds the one inane, niggling thing that is completely not relevant to the situation.  It happens to all of us in stages. It can start out with a little phrase like "Did you leave the oven on?" during an intimate moment, or "That wasn't a fart! OMG!" in a car or van full of people.

Yes, during these moments, it's as if time itself slows down and we see ourselves in slow motion and unable to stop the momentum of the situation. If you've ever seen Doctor Who, it doesn't matter, because anything can be undone. Unfortunately, Matt Smith and David Tenant are busy filming the next season and cannot bother to transport you back to the moment via Tardis. (Oh, dear! My geek is hanging out! Better shove that back in the IT closet.)

So what do you do when faced with the inevitable clarity of insanity? You laugh of course. You realize that life is but a series of random events shoved together to make you a stronger and better person. So you laugh, and hope that next time there won't be a next time. You realize that someday the peeing infant's wife will get to hear the story of his freely peeing, and life will go on. You wipe it up, (or spit it out...) laugh, and cuddle the little ball of ornery. You look at your toddler, tell them what you just said was a no-no word, and that mommy and daddy make mistakes. Then you laugh, and tell your toddler a funny story about when you were little.

You brace yourself for the incoming crash, then look at your spouse and say, "well, at least the insurance is good for something." Then you laugh, because tomorrow it will be worse, but then it will get better. You take these moments that somehow stick in your mind as failures, or errors, or even just slip-ups, and you assign them humor value. Why? Because if you focus on the little moments of clarified insanity, you will slowly drive yourself insane.

Soon you will find that the spills on the floor, and the stains on the shirts, and the dents in the fender incite a different response. Laughter. Things happen. (More to me and Das Bear than a lot of people...) and giving a positive and forward thinking response will save you a lot of pain.

Or you could just go kick a door, break your toes, yell at a nurse, gripe at your spouse, growl at your children, and scold the dog...

To Spreading Positivity and Accepting Faults.

Love and Laughter,
-Kat Lady