Getting High on Recovery

Your keys hold profound lessons. Don’t neglect them, because they want to talk to you.

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New keys always stick. 

I don’t know the exact reason why. It could be because new keys are sharp, and the edges are perfect. They don’t quite fit.

You have to help them through the chamber.

It’s like the key is just too new, too perfect. The lock resists a little.

It protests.

Your pocket is full of well-used keys. You forget what it is like to have a new key until you get one and try it on the lock.

Twice this week I have had to work with new keys to get them to work in their locks. They needed some help to find their home.

New keys are like anything else: a new baby, a new job, a new school year, a new summer with all of its promise. New experiences are rarely easy on us. In fact, they need some help to move along.

If your life circumstances were easy, they would not fit you. The fact that things are hard is the way that life works on us. We need to be taught how to fit the lock. We need to be remade so that we fit with whatever new reality is growing around (or within) us. 

You are like a new key. Sometimes you can be sharp, with rough and perfect edges. Sometimes you expect too much and you can be stuck up and rigid.

Then life comes along and knocks your off edges. Life has to teach you how to fit.

The best keys are the well-used keys. They have been worked on and made smooth by years of work.

The Four Keys to Relationship Resilience:

Keys can become funny colored. You can take on funny colors too. Funny looking Africa-shaped blotches in various places on your body. Blotches are nature’s way of giving you a tattoo. Only this one is free and doesn’t hurt. Except when your doctor needs to give you a biopsy.

Keys become scratched and scarred but they get where they fit. The best keys have scratches all over the place, deep scars too. Only, you don’t notice them much because the key has learned how to fit into that one lock. When you find your destiny, your calling, you will find a way to put the scratches and scars of life into their place too. No, it won’t all be perfect. It’s just that the scars are put into perspective. Put your energy into living your life and your healing will find you.

Keys thrive in a community. Key rings are some of the happiest places. Our keys are never alone. Car, home, trailer, garage, and work. It’s all there. Various shapes, sizes, colors and even fobs with advanced technology.  Our keys are a microcosm of diversity and unity. No two are alike, yet they each have their place in our life. In the same way for you and I, our community can be made up of family, friends, pets, online, podcasts and through what I think of as the cathedral of books.

Keys are forgotten because they are immensely useful. You and I get forgotten now and then. It happens. The most useful things in our lives, our keys, get forgotten. We can neglect them sometimes. We only remember the importance of our keys when we forget where we put them. Funny, we remember when we forget. Life is like that. We remember the most important things only after we have forgotten them.

Our keys are more than the answer to the lock. They are reminders. Reminders of the things that are most important. Perhaps you have neglected a relationship, your body, your art, your faith, your pet or your car. Your key is whispering to you that there is still time.

If you like this post, you will want to read Six Ways that Midlife is the Best Time to Be Alive and Happiness: Profound Lessons from a Paperclip.

I write articles about wellness, leadership, parenting and personal growth. My hope is to deliver the best content I can to inspire, to inform and to entertain.

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Keep it Real

Previously published in a different version on smswaby

Photo by Carlos Ginard