Do you remember your first home? Many homes need remodeling and landscaping, which comes with unexpected disappointments. Imagine your dream home is located in a remote valley where buildings don’t go above two stories, there are acres of avocado trees, children safely walk from neighborhoods to schools and even the local market on the main boulevard.
The summers are extremely hot, 115 degrees. Your home is situated at the end of a cul-de-sac isolated on a high, flat hill surrounded by mountains. This two-acre property is dirt and wild weeds.
You are the male patriarch and made the decision to landscape the flat land surrounding the home. You envision the rose bushes your wife dearly loves, a fountain with fragrant flowers in the entry, and lush grass sweeping the flat grounds with ivy cascading down the hillsides. The backyard will have a playhouse and swings. A pool has been installed with a hillside waterfall made up of lava rocks. It’s summer.
You’ve rented a hand plow with leather shoulder straps. Since it’s stifling hot you’re bare chested, straps are harnessed tightly and you begin to plow your land. Only the dirt ground won’t give way to the plow. It’s relentless. The tougher the soil, the harder you push!
Nuns in the convent next door raise bees to harvest honey as income. There’s a hundred hives, all a surprise. The heat, bees, weeds, dirt unrelenting to plow and these strange tiles are all unexpected disappointments but you will not be discouraged!
The next weekend you rent a motorized rototiller. The blue rocks are pouring out hitting you harder from the motorized rototiller. The ground erupts with more tiles and then it happens. You ripped out the entire septic system! The toilets back up. The smell, the mess. The dream becomes a nightmare.
This is a true story about my dad. Michael Landon was Charles Ingalls before “Little House on the Prairie” was conceived. It was the 1960s, the days of “Bonanza,” and this was our first family home in rural Encino Valley. I was nine years old.
Today’s emotional climate is filled with broken expectations and harsh disappointments often spreading misplaced anger into innocent lives. We’ve been observing violent chaos terrorizing us. We’re all affected. One important solution to chaos is for each of us to find purpose, the lesson, in unexpected disappointments.
Most times these disappointments become misplaced emotions, and challenges feel out of our control. It’s easy to shove these feelings deep down inside of us. Yet, the anger and frustration start to eat away at our peace of mind.
Innocent lives become targets of misplaced anger. This misplaced anger has little, if anything, to do with the innocent person being attacked. Others believe they must resort to violence to bring purpose to their cause. The more violent, the more attention. More innocent lives become victims of these attacks. This needs to stop! How?
We all experience broken expectations and disappointments. We are not alone. Realizing we all share challenging disappointments is an important awareness to have empathy for the emotional struggles of others, perhaps ourselves.
This empathy offers a greater sense of gratitude for our own struggles. Ultimately, the only way to experience the richness of life is an attitude of gratitude. This liberates us to understand the trial’s lesson with better solutions.
I find to appreciate what I have and to do so with empathy opens the way to a universal Higher Power. This Higher Power provides wisdom for quality solutions, greater peace of mind. We have the “Golden Rule” which ensures the best way to experience happiness is treating others as one seeks to be treated. A great way to experience higher power is to feel the wind.
The wind is an imagery for this powerful force. We cannot see the wind yet we feel it. The wind is invisible and powerful. Like the wind’s powerful invisible force, so is the force in our challenging disappointments. Disappointments are heart wrenching. It hurts deeply, feels hard to breathe, and lacks energy to move our body.
Yet, this hurt builds character, teaching us lessons we would not have learned but for these challenges. Challenges divulge the higher power’s intended lessons through the attitude of gratitude, and not through pity. Yes, feel the pain but also seek out gratitude. It’s liberating!
Today’s emotional climate strikes us as an exploding danger zone warning we’re at a breaking point. Increasing wars, violence, environmental hazards, global economic chaos… Frightening.
There is the return to a better world, our own world, if we believe!
My dad never gave up on us and neither should we. He knew fierce disappointments and determined strength of empathy and gratitude.
Our Encino home provided 12 years of profound happiness. This happiness began with the unexpected septic explosion. The ride to the other side is taking our broken expectations, disappointments, misplaced emotions and feeling the wind to believe there’s a better solution waiting for us!
Cheryl Landon is a Coronado resident and is a daughter of actor Michael Landon.
