This has been a rough week for me on many levels. Last Tuesday, I crashed my car into a speed limit sign, It’s in an impound lot in West Allis, waiting for the insurance company to determine if its repairable or not. In a year of dumpster fires, this has been the dumpster fire icing on the cake.

What’s worse for me, rather than any physical damage, is the damage it did to my self esteem. If you ever get to know me, you know I suffer from low self-esteem, chronically. Being without a car in this area is crippling. I’m going to have a tough time getting to one job, let alone, two. And it’ going to negatively impact my ability to have a social life, and so much more.

And yes, it could be worse. I could have been injured, or hurt someone else when I crashed the car. But try telling that to a brain that already does its best to make you feel like less. I managed to put off having a meltdown about it, mostly until tonight, after Jasmine dropped me off at home, after celebrating her birthday this weekend. Then I let it out for a few minutes.

I say that like its not a big deal, but to me it is. In the past, this would have set me back for days. And yes, I wasn’t a 100 percent the last few days, but I didnt curl up in a ball. I began to move the mountain.

There’s a story about a white guy who went to visit the fabled Shaolin monks, He wandered around the monastery, hoping to see some of the amazing feats the monks could supposedly perform. After a week, he went down to the river, disgusted by how ordinary everything was.

As he sat there, an old monk came down and asked him what was wrong. The man ranted about how there wasn’t any magic anywhere around. The old monk smiled and asked if wanted to see some magic. The man said yes. The monk pointed to a hill across the creek.

“Would you like to see the hill moved from one side of the creek to the other?” The monk asked. The man nodded. The monk walked across the creek, picked up a big rock off the hill and walked over tot he other side of the creek, He kept doing this until the white man asked him what he was doing,

“I’m going ot come out here , every day, and move the rocks from the hill to the other side of the river. When I die, my son will keep doing the same And if the hill is not moved by him, his son will move rocks.”

The point of the story here, for me, is that sometimes we can’t see the magic. We see the game winning shot, not the years of practice before it. We dismiss the art drawn in ten minutes, not knowing the hundreds of drawings it took to get there.

My biggest failing is not seeing that magic. I can visualize the goals, but not the steps to take to get there. And I sometimes forget to appreciate the little steps it takes to move forward, every day. I could focus on the storm I let loose out of my brain today, or I can appreciate the small steps I’ve been taking to get to a point where the storm was just a microcell and not a tornado. Appreciate the small steps, folks. Somedays, it’s all you’ve got. Now if you excuse me, I have a bus schedule to consult. Good night.

PS. “Magic is the art of getting shit done.”-Phil Brucato