Lessons from a Turtle By Ashley
I love turtles, especially sea turtles. Cool facts: they have been around since the dinosaurs, and they are connected to the earth’s magnetic field by little magnet-type things in their heads called magnetite crystals. This allows them to know where they are and, more importantly, to know where to come back to lay their eggs. Being directionally challenged, I think this skill is AMAZING! Not that I need a place to lay my eggs, but if I did, I definitely would NOT be able to find my way! Anyone who knows me knows this is a hard and, unfortunately, fast truth. Thank God for the developer of Google and Apple Maps! Can I get an amen?
Although it would be amazing to be able to find my way around without maps, I also often think how genuinely wonderful it would be to know I am on the right “life” track. I tend to be a person who jumps in feet, head, wrist, butt, spleen, heart…first and then finds out what it is that I am supposed to be doing. Because of this, sometimes I wish my gut feeling was a bit stronger or my intuition a bit more fierce. I wish I had those crystals to guide me. (Yes, I know, be careful what you wish for!)
Then something usually reminds me it’s the “not knowing” that makes life interesting. You know, we’ve all had those wrong turns in life that were just plain wrong, and we were like, “Well, shoot, but look what I learned!” And then we’ve had those wrong turns that were actually right because they protected us or led us down a better path. And we were like, “Thank God I made that wrong turn!”
As I was writing this blog, the poem below came to mind. This poem was shared with me by a friend when I honestly did not know which direction to go in my life and I could have definitely used some of those turtle crystals.
What do you think? Would you like some little magnetites in your brain to help put you on the right life track? Or is stepping out into the darkness with no crystals to guide you part of the ultimate beauty of being a human and not a turtle?
I also think hummingbirds are the bee’s knees, but that’s another post for another day. 🙂
