Grinding teeth

Have you ever woken up one morning to find that your teeth don't come together like they used too. There is something different or unnatural about your bite. You spend all day trying to get your teeth to go the way they should, feeling slightly uncomfortable and wishing you could get it out of your mind. You obsess about it, and it nags at you and goes on and on. Then one day it is gone, you don't even remember when, or how, but things feel normal again. As a matter of fact you don't know if you got used to the new feeling, or if the slight difference in your bite went away and it is back to the way it was?

I feel like I have just done that with my life, and it happens in good ways and bad ways. I have experienced both. Sometimes, no matter what the outcome was, good or bad, my life was changing for good and it was not something I had control of.  I have like many people gone on with life sometimes living with the nagging irritable and sometimes horrifying feeling that things were never going to meet again the way I always thought they should.

Then one day I don't know when it happened, how or even why it happened, but it always does, things feel normal again.

I can't exactly say that every thing is perfect. Things happen some severe and scary and some delightful. I think that I just have a hard time sometimes adjusting to new. Even when it is wonderful it nags at me. I wonder how many people are the same. I wonder how it affects our lives, our ability to take risks, to embark on new endeavors.

If our idea of safety is so profound that little things make us feel unsafe, insecure, uneasy and unwilling to live, how does anyone accomplish anything?

I have watched some people in my family, friends and in my general circle of acquaintances who are so frightened of the unknown that they won't take steps to improve their lives, even though it will enrich and benefit them. They have nothing to lose and there is minimal risk involved and yet they still can't bring themselves to step out of their safe box as small and uncomfortable as it is. It is their box and they know what to expect.

I have also watched other people in my circle take huge risks, going out on a limb to satisfy an urge, to quiet a craving for newness, to explore things that may be perilous and dangerous or may leave them broke. They do this with excitement, and ambition, a desire for the feelings and things and experiences that are unknown. They do it without reserve, because it is their life, and they don't feel they have a box, they feel that life is a bunch of boxes that you collect and stack and when they work out then you have a cardboard castle, and when they don't work out and the castle collapses you have a bunch of cardboard boxes.

If you look at the risk taker and the person living inside the box, you can see that no matter how many times your castle falls down, you still have all the boxes the experiences that you have accumulated, to go ahead and rebuild. The person inside the box is sad, you can't build a castle from inside a cardboard box, and you can call one box a castle as much as you want but when side by side, any child would take a pile of boxes with which they can build anything they want over one cardboard box with a troll living inside it any day.

Hmmmm....I guess this post is pretty boring but just some thoughts spewing out of my head. I just don't want to ever miss a chance to collect a box for my castle.