Cabin Fever and Glass Slippers

It's probably too early for me to have cabin fever... But I do anyway. I find myself looking longingly out the frost coated windows, day-dreaming about adventures in warm, tropical climates or running with Indiana Jones through desert valleys, trying to escape Nazis. Not that life isn't good, because it is, but because no matter what you have, there's always going to be a little part of you that's looking for more. And if you aren't careful, this desire for more will cause you to overlook certain important truths.

Which brings me to Cinderella and her glass slippers. You see, it occurred to me that very often we get exactly what we want, but we don't realize it because it's looks a little different than expected. We wanted the American dream, generally thought to consist of a house, a white picket fence, a spouse, two or three kids, and yearly vacations to Disney World, and are surprised when to discover that the American dream also includes bills and in-laws and leaky-roofs and cars that refuse to start on cold mornings. We dream of adventures and are stressed when we run into car trouble on the road. We want to meet strange and exotic peoples and cannot understand our neighbor's partying habits. We are Cinderella, who wanted to go to a ball and didn't realized that she could use the moldy old pumpkin, a few local rodents, and what had to be the most uncomfortable shoes on God's good earth to make her dream come true.

Fairy Tales are not just stories - they remind us that, under the muck and mire of real-life problems, magic awaits. We are all Cinderella, who had the most impossible shoes and the worst day-job ever - but had the eyes to see beyond these encumbrances to where her fairy-tale began. 

Sometimes its hard to see beyond the every day to the great and good things that lie like buried treasure underneath. But it's there, if only we take the trouble to look. The ordinary are more often than not far more wondrous than they appear - and that applies as much to us as it does to a pair of unlikely glass slippers.

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