Where Does Your Power Come From?

I opened my electric bill the other day and along with the bill came the usual extras. An envelope for mailing back the bill along with a small information piece that asked me a simple question?

Do You Know Where Your Power Comes From?

Taunting me, challenging me with that bold question that some committee on the marketing team likely thought long and hard about to include in our bills.

Do I know? I turn on my light switch, press the up arrow on my thermostat and fully expect it go on. If for some reason it doesn’t, I sigh with the power is out sound of an otherwise lucky citizen of America where things like power come all too easy.

And I am completely grateful for this.

I never really consider where all this electricity comes from or how it's made. I don’t really think about what part my house plays as it takes up the small speck of the globe with my candles burning brightly in the windows lit up for the holidays and my phone chargers in a socket in almost every room.

The wind howls this morning, yet my lights stay on. I have light. I have power all around me.

The question though when I read it aloud gives me a deeper consideration, however.

DO I KNOW WHERE MY POWER COMES FROM? I am guessing that National Grid didn’t really think that their customers would turn this question inward, but it begged for this when I read it aloud.

DO I KNOW WHERE MY POWER COMES FROM? I asked myself as I began revving up for the busy Christmas season.

I know.

I Know Where My Power Doesn't Come From

But I have also learned that sometimes the places it doesn’t come from feed the reckoning later in the realization that I can’t always be on the Pure Power side of life. Sometimes I need a f#@! break.

So I head to outside power sources. Like a delicious bottle of red, or some homemade chocolate chip cookies, or some escape television binge watching a series like Yellowstone or Outlander. Sometimes I reorganize the endless things in my home, creating a chaotic symphony of clutter at every turn to give myself a reason for reordering. It all feels so good at the time until it doesn’t.

So I pick up the pieces, the fragments and shards of spirit that often come at my own expense but for some reason I need the dive to see the light again.
God forbid I should always be in the light, I say jokingly to no one but myself.
What am I afraid of? Why is it that when my power source is full brightness, I create its dimming? I have asked myself this question in so many of my writings.

Here is what I have learned in the process.

I need a break sometimes. I need the chatter and the energy to take a rest. I need to close the curtains, cover my eyes with a nice eye pillow, put on my sound machine and shut everything down once in a while. Lately I have leaned into my whirly spinney self and just gone for the ride knowing that I will course correct and start all over.

This actually IS my power. The ebbs and flows and the ands that lie between ebb AND flow. I have actually been enjoying the ANDS for a change. Not just the either ors, but all of the magic that is between the two.

Like that delightful moment after your power has been out for some time, and you actually just got used to the silence and the reading by candlelight and the excuse to stop checking emails. That delicious sigh of forced stopping of the constant moving because the power went out. Then that briefest of feeling of disappointment when you hear the sounds of your house turn back on and you know you have to get up and get back to work.

And you do and after the briefest moment of disappointment, you start your day with a new appreciation for the power you often take for granted.

And just to add my shameless self-promotion (after all it is the holidays, here is a link to some great items that give you your own sense of power - Wonder Woman swag, doesn't get more badass than her).