Ro (for Rowena), at five feet two, wore three inch heels. She’d toe them off, flipping them on their sides at the base of a wooden shoe holder my dad had built. He was six feet four and wore British Walkers—wing-tips. He’d polish the pairs and line them up on the closet floor or put them in their slot.
In the garden, Ro would take a handful of seeds, toss them at the ground, and zinnias in circus pennant colors would fill glass pitchers, while Duke planted straight rows of carrots, radishes, lettuce, and string beans across the lower yard, with cucumbers controlled in a corner, and an unruly patch of asparagus stalks anywhere in their large bed.
In my counseling practice, I liked to use objects to shift a client’s focus off an issue, while at the same time offering a different way of thinking. I’d take the hula hoop and ask the person to see how many times he or she could make it go around. My point followed that we “twist ourselves out of shape to please others.” Then I’d invite the person holding the hoop around them to drop it straight down, suggesting he or she begin to ask what he or she clearly wanted.
I might ask, “If there were a hundred flowers and one weed, what would he or she look at?” Or, “If a hundred weeds and one flower, what?” Ro, I knew, would look at zinnias, while Duke would concentrate on the weeds. But as this wasn’t a gardening question, my answer was what we put our attention on grows.
My realization is, “We have unlimited opportunity to watch and keep our focus where we want our lives to increase in abundance.”