Issue 65, January 2004
Back Burner
©Jane Teresa Anderson, January 2004
I was beginning to think I’d missed out on a new Christmas season
fashion fad. The perennial red Santa caps and tinsel earrings were
still de rigueur around town, but what was it about red bandages
wrapped around the right arm? Wrapped around the right forearm to be
precise. Encasing a seemingly strained or broken forearm to be
accurate.
In the space of two days I had encountered four people wearing red
plaster casts or heavy bandaging on their right forearms, two very
close at hand. One person had served me in a bank and one had served
me in a post office. The red bit I could understand. A little
seasonal jollying of the injury eases the pain. But two injured
service assistants? Now, that is peculiar.
The fifth sling-armed person passed Michael and I as we were walking
the short distance between our car and the cinema, prompting me to
relay my experiences to Michael. Just as I finished my story we
stepped up to the cinema ticket counter to be served by … a man with
a bandaged right forearm. He had, he explained, just sprained his
wrist.
By this time I was well and truly in the midst of synchronicity, but
why? What did it all mean?
That night I dreamed I was a surgeon about to operate on a man who
had lost his right forearm. I woke up to discover that my right arm
was completely numbed as I had been sleeping on it. Not only was I
experiencing synchronicities about injured right arms, but now I was
dreaming about them and even creating my own.
As is always the case with synchronicity, we find meaning baffling
at
the time. It’s only later that we look back with an ability to
understand the symbolism and see the big picture. Synchronicities
are
like waking life dreams, ripe with symbolism. They need
interpretation to make sense and, like dreams, they need a degree of
hindsight to comprehend them.
A synchronicity usually begins as a dream. The dream symbol spills
over into waking life. Knowing this, I consulted my dream journal,
looking for dreams of right forearms in the day or two leading up to
the synchronicities. I didn’t find a precise match, though it must
be
remembered that we recall only a fraction of our dreams. But …
In one dream a man sat so close to me, on my right side, our
shoulders touched. We were on a huge expanse of beach with no other
people around. In the dream I thought it odd that he chose to sit so
close to me. He talked about a dilemma I had over a project I was
working on.
I can see now that my dream showed me I was ‘too close’ to the
project to solve the dilemma. I really needed to step away from it
for a while, to pop it on the back burner of my mind. But what did I
do? Labour on. The pressure of the dilemma remained and my waking
life synchronicities reinforced the symbol of the creative pressure
and strain I was handling.
A further dream came to my rescue. In this dream I was driving my
car
to the showroom where I originally bought it, for a service. I
encountered a traffic-jam so I got out and picked up my car (it was
very light) and carried it into the showroom - in my right hand, of
course. I asked the sales assistant where to put my car. He
indicated
a bench top. I put my car, which was now a small saucepan with a
long
handle, on the bench top and left it in their care. It didn’t worry
me that my car was a saucepan. I knew it was really a car and that
it
would be reborn and renewed as a car when I came back to collect it.
This dream was easy for me to interpret and to follow. Putting the
saucepan on the bench top reminded me of an expression I use a lot:
putting an idea on the back burner. It was time to stop driving my
project (car) too hard as the pressure was only causing a
traffic-jam
(obstruction to the flow). It was better to put the project on the
back burner of my mind and take the pressure off. My unconscious
mind
could handle (like the saucepan handle) the job of solving the
dilemma while I relaxed and freed myself to see the bigger picture.
Forewarned by my dream, I was now rightly forearmed.
As it turned out, the Big Picture we had seen at the cinema was
“Lost
in Translation”. It was a great movie, but the title aptly described
what had been wrong with my project. Somewhere along the line the
message I had been trying to get across in the project was getting
lost in my choice of presentation.
The back burner always works for me, though sometimes I need a dream
or a synchronicity to remind me to stop stirring the pot and to move
it over to the back of my mind for some unconscious cooking.
Some people worry that putting an idea or problem on the back burner
is an act of procrastination, escapism or denial, but in my
experience the best creative solutions are those that have benefited
from a little slow cooking. The trick is to know when the back
burner
has done its work, to know when to bring the pot and its contents to
the forefront of your mind and to act on it before it boils over and
extinguishes the flame.
May 2004 surprise you with an abundance of perfectly timed,
delicious
dishes served direct from the backburner of your dreams to nourish
and enrich your spirit.
Jane Teresa Anderson
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