Skittish Hat Tossing

Standing out in the street and tossing my hat up into the air...watching it spin like a copter blade slicing through the blue sky, momentarily blocking out the omnipresent sun, and then dropping like a dead pigeon at my feet. Thud.

I don’t know what I was hoping for. Perhaps I was channeling Mary Richards from the classic Mary Tyler Moore Show. I can see myself, sporting a carefully planned ensemble of polyester, pleather, and wool, (complete with shiny accessories), feeling brazenly independent, and symbolically tossing my cares back to the gods, ridding myself of inhibition and stagnation.

I could be her; until the director shouts “cut!” and reality smacks me in the face. Then I’d take a big swig of black coffee, shed my New York wardrobe, scratching at all the wooly places because I’m not Little Bo Peep and only sheep and Scottish bag-pipers should wear wool, and head back to my cockroach infested flat with cold water and no heat.

Or perhaps I was giving up, tossing my hat in despair, but I chickened out half way through the toss, because quitting feels like death and I want to live forever. Actually, quitting scares me even more than death.

Then again, I may have been tossing my hat into the ring, challenging life in a no-holds-barred, pure blood and guts competition; although that doesn’t really sound like me. I’m more apt to want to be life’s best friend so she doesn’t get pissed off at me and kick my ass. Whatever it was that inspired me to toss my hat into the sky, it certainly stirred up a lot of thoughts.

For example: lately I’ve been trying to figure out a way of making some big changes in my life. It’s as though I’ve been stacking wood for years and suddenly I’ve realized that the wood on the bottom of the stack needs to be replaced with bricks. Pulling the wood from the bottom will make the entire stack crumble and all those years of stacking will be lost. So, in order to make these big changes I’m going to have to think carefully about how to go about it, take my time, and be willing to lose some of the things that I’ve been leaning on…things that seem paramount to my survival.



So, I guess I was skittishly, but officially, tossing my hat into the ring. Somebody once said, “People don’t usually change until the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of changing.” I’m there.