Snowglobes and Easter Bunnies

I was having a heart-to-heart talk with a special friend recently. She is going through an interesting time in her life where someone is turning her life upside down and making her re-examine everything about herself and what she is doing and how she is living.

In listening to her story, I sensed a similarity with an experience in my own past and told her, "Oh, that's a snowglobe person." (It's a name I made up years ago.)

Sometimes you will meet a person, someone who comes out of the blue, unexpected, unasked for, perhaps even a total stranger, and that person shakes up everything you know or think you know about yourself so that all of a sudden, life around you is filled with flurries. They can be flurries of uncertainty and fear, but if you can stand still for a moment and realize what is going on, then the flurries can be motes of excitement and change, too.

In the midst of the snowstorm, however, life can feel very cold and lonely. Especially when you see inbetween the snowflakes to the path that might lie ahead. And it's a path you didn't really want to take but you knew it was out there, waiting. You can go back inside and warm yourself by the fire and ignore the path, or you can put on your boots and your coat and start down the trail.

I think these snowglobe people do not even know that they are shaking up someone's life. I've had a couple of these people enter my life, as if it were a play. They might be onstage with me for a short time--in once instance just a week--but in that time, the storyline of my play changed course forever.

And just as suddenly as they appeared in my life, they were gone again. When the flurries settled, everything I thought I had I didn't want and what I saw in front of me was new and different. As hard as it was to change my course, in the end I am grateful to these snowglobe people because without them, I wouldn't have the life I have today and realize the gifts they have given me.

I wonder, how many of us are snowglobe people to others, and we don't even realize it.

***

There is another type of person I have encountered recently. I am not sure if they are a type of snowglobe person, but they might be related.

I call them Chocolate Easter Bunny people.

From the outside, these people look perfectly yummy and wonderful. They are a delight to look at and seem perfectly formed. They are intoxicating and miraculous.

So you are drawn to them by what you see, enticed to take a nibble of their wonderfulness. But when you do, you find them to be completely hollow inside, like those molded chocolate bunnies that have no center.

And you wonder, how could I have been so stupid? How could I not have known there was no substance, that all I saw was colorful foil and pretty packaging?

There is no way to tell, I think.

I have to figure out how to deal with the illusion and move on. To try not to second-guess someone and be apprehensive that I will be left with a hollow shell, a puff of smoke. To take the disappointment and rejection if it happens and make it work for me instead of being resentful.

To turn a Chocolate Easter Bunny into a Snowglobe.

One of these photos borrowed from here.