I love to get up early. 5 am is my favorite. So it’s dark and it’s quiet and I turn my lights on just the way I want them so that the back yard is lit up and my back deck lights are on and it all looks like a beautiful 5 star resort. It really does and I appreciate every moment of early mornings, I look around and was just so grateful. So this morning i sit down to have my coffee in my favorite spot overlooking the back and there’s a light shining in my eye not just one but two blue white spot lights coming from the neighbors house. We have lots of trees but they can’t possibly block these lights. So now I’m like what in the world. And I can feel myself getting irritated because of these lights. So now I sit up a little bit because I’m wondering what I’m going to do about those lights ruining my morning as I sit up a little straighter I realize now I don’t see them so much because my line of sight is different. And I also realized hey. You’re ruining your own morning. Because there may not be anything you can do about those lights but if something as simple as sitting up a little straighter makes it better, why not just do that? You see the more I focused on the lights the worse they got. Not literally they weren’t getting brighter but I was making it worse in my head. So I asked myself how do I give myself peace right now? For starters just sit up a bit so it’s not in your eyes and second stop focusing on it.
There’s always going to be things like that in life. There will always be things we can focus on that upset us and the more we focus on it the more upset we get and the bigger the thing gets. I was literally walking through scenarios where I somehow sneak on their property and aim them down so they aren’t shining so straight out or is there an ordinance or something about lights maybe the city could do something about it. That’s neighborly isn’t it? Both of those ideas were really bad. But once I sat up and it wasn’t directly in my eye I realized I was making it a lot worse because I just kept dragging on about it. It’s there. There’s nothing going to change that those lights are there. So how do I find peace right now? I sit up straighter and I change my focus. The lights are still there but I’m not focusing on them anymore so I’m just not letting it bother me. It’s part of my day today. We actually had the same problem on the front of the house when we first moved in. Our bedroom faces the front and our other neighbor installed the brightest spotlight ever and even with our woven shades down it would light up our room quite a bit. I thought about asking them to change the direction of their light back then too but we fixed the problem on our end. So I simply designed a Roman shade with blackout lining and wala problem fixed. That was 15 years ago. The light is still there too, we just took things into our own hands and now it doesn’t bother us at all.
We live in a world with other people. As long as that is the case which I hope is forever because it would be a lonely place, have you ever seen that movie with Will Smith where he’s the only human left alive in all of New York? He would have paid money to have a neighbor shining lights into his eyes.
And it may seem like I’m asking for us all to settle for less than we want. But that’s not what I’m saying at all. I couldn’t do anything about my neighbors lights at 5 in the morning but I was wrecking my own morning by focusing on them. By changing my focus I was able to remember that I’ve had this problem before and we overcame it, I can do it again. I also realized that just changing how I was sitting made it where I didn’t really see them. That was super easy to do.
