All this pondering was triggered by going out with an older friend to a pre-church breakfast a couple Sundays ago. We ate at West Avenue Grill, one of our favorite restaurants. I ordered the Veggie Benedict - two (usually) perfectly poached eggs atop grilled portobello mushrooms, spinach & roasted red peppers, their luscious home fries on the side.
For the first time ever, my eggs were not sublime, not cooked to perfect liquidity. They were, sad to say, hard cooked. Our server was horrified & immediately reached for my plate, saying he'd put a rush on the corrected order.
I balked. I wouldn't let him take them back.
He protested - they were uneatable.
I stood my ground.
Reluctantly, he bowed to my obstinancy.
It was strange, experiencing my inner determination to eat the hard-cooked eggs. STRONG. Unyielding. Totally irrational. What was this all about?
In a swoosh of startle awareness, it hit me. When I was very little, Mom got me to eat all of my eggs by having the yolk be sad - I'd eaten all of the egg white, yet left it alone. I am, to this day, prone to anthropomorphizing, giving inanimate objects human characteristics. Giving those shunned yolks human feelings - sadness at being left alone - did the trick every time. I ate the yolk.
Now, sixty years later, I apparently still feel honor bound to eat a yolk, even when improperly cooked. There's no doubt in my mind I would have agreed to have it recooked - had been a runny egg white. But the yolk? I could not do it!
It is rare that I get to experience a trigger as it is setting off an action. Deeply grateful for those improperly poached eggs. Due to them, I got to FEEL the depth of an ancient trigger, rooted in a mother just doing all in her power to get her little girl to eat all of her egg.
My grief-struck egg yolk trigger is just one trigger affecting my life. I'd love to say it's the tip of my trigger ice berg, but strongly suspect it is the tip of the tip.
How many of us give much thought to the triggers that affect our lives? To the ones that affect the lives of those we love or work with or are connected to in some other way?
It used to drive me around the bend that Mom could NOT do certain things, certain very important things. She'd see the importance of doing them, agree to do them, then not follow through. For a long time, I took it personally. Until the day - long ago, thank goodness before she was reunited with her O! Best Beloved - it hit me that something was triggering her response, a trigger she didn't even recognize, maybe couldn't have recognized if it was explained to her by the most brilliant counselor on the planet.
Ever since the Veggie Benedict incident, I've been aware of how many of my responses & actions are triggered by forces & memories far beyond my conscious awareness. If that is true for me, it is true for all.
May that realization - that if it's true for me, it's true for all - temper my responses to frustrating moments, the realization that there's more to each situation than meets the eye, that what I see & understand is often - maybe most of the time - a teensy bit of what's what. May it trigger compassion, tenderness, and a willingness to be kind.
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