Alligator Country

After my home flooded from Hurricane Katrina, my ex-husband visited New Orleans and took pictures of the gut wrenching damage done to our home. I remember I had warned him to be careful entering the house, as I had heard that there were alligators living in people’s abandoned, flooded houses.

He emailed me pictures of the nauseating destruction and it was so scary and sad to click through the pictures. The damage done was so bad, that it took me several seconds to make sense of each picture. The office chair was lying on its’ side on the dining room table and the bedroom mattress was half way into the dining room.

Everything was destroyed and in that moment, I was smacked with the enormity of this deeply personal loss. I was scared and uncertain as to how we would recover from this tragedy. It was hard to think about anything but the shock that fate had dealt us.

On one of the living room pictures, something struck me as different from the others and I wiped away my tears to figure it out. I saw the stuffed toy alligator, bought as a joke about moving to “ ‘gator country” perfectly posed on top of the recliner. Beneath the photo, was the caption, “There really is an alligator in the living room!”

I broke into peals of laughter as I realized my ex-husband had made a joke of the widespread radio rumors of alligators running loose in people’s homes. Even though our home flooding was a depressing experience, that one act of silliness and humor lifted my spirits and greatly increased my energy.

These days, if I am grappling with a number of “impossible” circumstances, and I find myself back in that place of not seeing how life can be good again, I think of that stuffed alligator. It serves as a reminder that if I could laugh while in the midst of my (literally) destroyed life, then I can find a way to feel at least as good about anything else. This “unsticks” my perspective, shifting me into a higher energy mindset.

That alligator reminds me that I can find the funniness, irony, and hope in bad circumstances. With that frame of mind, there is nothing in life that can’t be turned into a chance to create something great.

A reoccurring struggle for me is that I tend to get caught up in my life and take it too seriously. When my life starts going hay-wire, I can have a difficult time handling it.

Remembering to lighten up and see the humor in a situation helps me to let go of the need to control my life. After all, I was dealt one heck of a wild card, and the only way I got through it with sanity was to see myself as independent from my possessions and money. The possessions were temporary and no amount of money from the insurance companies provided any real, long-term happiness.

Once I realized that my happiness wasn’t tied to the battered house or to the Pottery Barn lamps bought just days before the flooding, I was free and felt enlightened. I found myself treating the situation as a kind of game: my only towel was in the wash? OK, then how about using that ugly striped turtleneck from the garbage bag of donated clothes that had been given to me? I shifted from the pain of the situation to the humor in the situation. I enjoyed what was at hand, instead of focusing on the outcome. I stepped outside of myself and viewed my life as though I was a stranger to it, and I saw the crazily amusing aspects of it. This gave me so much energy and hope and, eventually, the ability to rebuild again.

If I had held onto the sadness and stress of that situation, I doubt that I would have been able to rebuild my life again so quickly. When we are in lower and slower energies, then we react at a lower and slower level, prohibiting the fast changes that we so deeply desire. I learned that I could choose what to focus on in my life. I chose to focus on the things that made me feel good and I let the rest become blurry. In life, we can all choose and I choose the alligator.

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