One crisp autumn morning, I drove downtown for a breakfast meeting with a client. I hummed along to the oldies music on the radio and found myself smiling.
When I stopped at a red light, I noticed a faint whisper of steam in front of my car. It was rising from the space between my front bumper and the back of the mini-van that stopped in front of me. I figured the source of the steam was the mini-van's warm exhaust meeting with the cold air. So I turned my attention back to the song on the radio.
At the next traffic light, the mini-van scooted through the intersection as the light turned yellow. I caught the red light. As I sat there, I noticed steam-like vapor rising from the hood of my car. But this time there was no mini-van's exhaust pipe in front of me. The cold air against my car's warm engine is causing this vapor, I thought. I glanced at my temperature gauge just in case the engine was more than warm. But the car was fine. The gauge indicated a medium temperature. So on I went.
I found a parking spot, met with my client, and then drove home.
At 6:30 that evening, I got back into my car and headed to my Monday night writing class. At a stop sign along the way, I noticed a faint bit of steam rising from the hood of my car again. I pulled a familiar bit of reasoning from my short-term memory. Okay, it's got to be the cold night air against the car's warm engine that's causing this, I figured. But unconvinced of my logic, I checked the temperature gauge. It said normal. I shrugged, drove on and got to class a few minutes later.
I took my seat and pushed aside any concern about my car's mysterious vapor. I was relieved to focus instead on the writing lesson of the week.
I had an uneventful ride home. When I walked in the door, I mentioned the vapor to my husband. "I'll take a look under the hood for you tomorrow," Steve said.
A week of tomorrows went by. Neither of us remembered to check under the hood. But I didn't see any vapor that week, either.
So I went on about my business, paying less and less attention to the car's temperature gauge each day. I figured the less I checked the gauge, the less my chances would be of finding anything wrong.
At the end of the week, I drove to my chiropractor's office. I settled into a chair in the waiting room. Not in the mood for thumbing through the old copies of Reader's Digest or People, I amused myself by looking around the room. I checked the clock on the wall a few times, noticed that the Boston fern was greener than the one I had at home, figured it must be artificial, and stared at the geometric pattern of the blue and white carpet.
Whoops. I turned back to the wall. Something next to the clock had caught my eye. Something I hadn't noticed before - despite the many times I'd been to my chiropractor's office. The something was a small, brown, wooden sign:
Five dangerous words:
Maybe it will go away.
The sign was posted to encourage my chiropractor's clients to listen to their bodies and to come in for treatment sooner rather than later. But the sign said much more than that to me that day.
In a flash it told me to attend to that vapor coming out of the hood of my car. And as soon as my appointment was over, I drove straight to the
I told the attendant on duty about the vapor. One look and she had the mystery solved. "Your radiator is cracked," she told me." One more mile and it would have overheated. You must know your car pretty well to have come in when you did. It's a good thing you listened to the signs."
She had no idea what sign I'd "listened" to.
Perhaps there is a situation you face in your life that you wish would either go away - disappear with a snap of your fingers and magic phrase like "presto-change-o" - or be transformed overnight without any intervention on your part. Whether that circumstance is a dissatisfying career, an unrealized dream, a bad marriage, an injustice you don't want to mention, signs of abuse that you'd rather not acknowledge, or a mile high stack of unopened mail - one thing is certain:
Wishing that "maybe it will go away" won't make it so. Only action that supports the situation you do want to create holds the power of transformation.
Erica Ross-Krieger, M.A.
Erica Ross-Krieger, M.A., is a nationally acclaimed Success Coach and author of the newly released inspirational book, Seven Sacred Attitudes - How to Live in the Richness of the Moment. You can reach Erica at: Erica@EricaRossKrieger.com or feel free to visit her website at: www.EricaRossKrieger.com
