Welcome to the Daily Ascent. I'm Ollie Carmel and this is the podcast I always wish existed. A bite sized on the ground spiritual note that can shift your thinking and your outlook on life to help make us all a little bit more awake, alive and ascending. So I have a story for you today that's kind of silly and also I think, kind of profound.
And it's all about a purple kitchen. And I thought about this story because my dog Danny is rehabbing from his surgery and I have to spend so much time walking him through our backyard on his leash. And usually I just like open the door, let him run out, he does his business, comes back in. But now I'm out there with him all the time, and especially at night.
And our backyard overlooks a nursing home right behind the house that is super well lit. And I appreciate it endlessly because there's light back there at night. And when you're standing outside in the dark with an excited 75 pound lab who isn't supposed to be moving fast, it's a gift. And while I was out there, I remembered this story about when I lived in Charlotte, North Carolina.
I had the cutest little house of all time. I love that house so much. But when I was looking at the house, I only looked at it during the day. And so my first night there, I walked into my kitchen and I swear to God, it was glowing purple.
Like, my entire kitchen was lit up purple because there was a huge, aggressive purple lamp in my neighbor's backyard that flooded my house with this eerie violet light. Like, I literally thought the UFO was going to come into my kitchen. And to say I was a ghast was like an understatement. I was just, I was beside myself.
And you know me, I like went to my neighbor's house the next day and was like, you know, can you please turn off that light? And he was like, that's not my life. That's new. He said, you know, that's not my life, sweetheart.
That's the town of Charlotte's Light. It was so. It was like some kind of municipal light and there was nothing he could do about it and nothing I can do about it. Like, the purple light stays and I like that.
I needed to move. I just, I thought this was the worst decision of my entire life. Like, this house is ruined and I cannot live like this. And what was I thinking?
And everything is purple and my life is over. And you know where the story goes? That was October. And in December, I got Danny.
He was just a little 30 pound puppy back then, the tiniest, messiest, most adorable creature. And he did not know how to use stairs and was just this little, cute, little chaos machine. And I remember walking him outside at night, this little baby puppy, and thinking, oh, my God, I'm so glad that I have all of this light outside of my house in the darkness, because I could see where we were going, and I didn't need to bring a flashlight and a headlamp, and I could just see Danny, and he was safe, and I was safe. And so that purple light that I thought was the worst thing about my house became the best thing about my house.
The exact same light. Nothing about, nothing about it changed, but my needs changed and my perspective changed along with it. And so that means that brings me to today's pocket stage. And we've had this guy on the show before, too, John o'.
Donohue. And this is from his book, To Bless the Space Between Us. He's an Irish poet and a philosopher and a former priest and just a really, really beautiful writer, and he writes. Each day holds a surprise, but only if we expect it can we see, hear, or feel it.
When it comes to us, let's not be afraid to receive each day's surprise. Whether it comes to us as sorrow or as joy, it will open a new place in our hearts, a place where we can welcome new friends and celebrate more fully our shared humanity. How good is that? Let me read that again for those of you in the back.
Each day holds a surprise, but only if we expect it can we see, hear, or feel it. When it comes to us, let's not be afraid to receive each day's surprise. Whether it comes to us as sorrow or as joy, it will open a new place in our hearts, a place where we can welcome new friends and celebrate more fully our shared humanity. And, I mean, that purple light came to me as sorrow, to say the least.
As terror, probably. I mean, I received that thing as disaster, but it opened a new place, a place where I could walk my puppy safely in the dark. The surprise was the same. What I was willing to receive changed everything.
And so our word of the day today is light. And I mean, light really does double duty in the story, doesn't it? There's the literal light, right? The purple glow flooding into my kitchen.
And then there's the other kind of light, the shift in perspective that changes how you see everything. And the reading today is really saying that every day holds a surprise. And whether that surprise becomes sorrow or joy depends largely on how we're willing to receive it, right? We're speaking in general terms here, my friends, but in this story, the purple light didn't transform.
I transformed. And once I did, the thing that I despised became the thing I was most grateful for. And I don't know, I think we all do this a lot of the time. We encounter something in our lives, a situation, a limitation, a person, a circumstance, and we decide it's a problem, and we label it a problem, and we resist it and we rage against it.
And then sometimes months or years later, we look back and think, wow, that was actually the thing. That was actually the gift. I just couldn't see it yet because I was too busy being aghast, right? And here's what I want you to sit with today.
Like, we don't get to choose what shows up in our lives most of the time. Like, we don't get to choose the purple light, but we get to choose how we hold it. And sometimes the thing that looks like a curse at first glance is actually a blessing. Saying that hasn't revealed itself yet.
And I mean, hear me out. This is not toxic positivity. This is not a toxic positivity show. I am never saying that everything happens for a reason or that all bad things are secretly good.
I'm never saying that. I mean, some things are just really hard and evil exists and, like, all of that, right? But I am saying that we write the story about what things mean way too fast. Way too fast.
Like, we look at the purple light for one night and we decide the whole house is ruined. And we often don't give life enough time to show us what's next. And, you know, when I got Dani, I wasn't, like, looking for a reason to be grateful for that light. It just happened.
The gratitude found me because life shifted. And suddenly I could see the purpose in something that made me completely miserable. I didn't have to force that reframe. I just had to stay long enough for it to arrive.
And that is the thing about perspective that we don't always talk enough about, right? It's almost never available in the moment. You can't force yourself to see the gift while you're standing in the middle of the mess. But if you can stay, if you can resist the urge to run or catastrophize or declare the whole thing a disaster, perspective will have a way of finding you, I think.
You swear on that the light will reveal itself, and sometimes it'll be purple. So my reflective question for you today. What are you looking at right now that might look completely different. Six months from now, and I am right here with you Ascenders.
I'm always learning that the thing that I want to run from might be the exact thing I end up being the most grateful for. And if this episode made you think or made you smile, you know, send it to a friend, post it on your Instagram, you know, like it, subscribe to it, do all of the things I'm so into growing our Ascender crew. We rise together. Until next time.