A View from a Different Lens

I find it amazing that a different day, hour, minute, mood, or awareness can inspire such alternate views on the same thing.  A few days ago for a couple of days, I kept hearing a neighbour's dog bark.  Some my thoughts were, "Shut the F (long form) up," and "Shut the F (again, long form) up."  To say the least, it was annoying and irritating to me.  This actually brings me back to when I was a practising alcoholic, as an uninvited live-in basement guest at my Grandma's (Mimmi's) which so happened to be occupied by my best-friend and brother-cousin or brousin (he made that up the other day...IT'S GREAT).  As per usual, I have become side-tracked.  So ya, I remember being hungover and tired...therefore I was still sleeping.  My Mimmi had a budgie making a sorts of racket and disturbing my self-induced coma.  Did that ever infuriate me.  I was yelling into my pillow, yes you guessed it, "Shut the F (and again, long form) up."  Back then though, it was with more rage.  Like come on, it had to be 1 pm...way too early to be woken up by a bird after a "good" night, right?
Here's a couple of things that I realize.  I may not be sleeping in until 1 pm anymore with a hangover, filled with rage a tiny bird singing, but I still am on this journey of not accepting things that do not conform to my view of perfection....F'n dog!  But no, not F'n dog or F'n birdy!  I started to read this book called Spiritual Intelligence: A new way of being by Brian Draper and was given an opportunity to reflect on what was going on that I may have been missing.  I am finding that I am beginning to really look at things different as I did when I was sick and blind.  Like I said, I still do struggle, but I am aware and I do eventually see things differently.  When I was laying there with the book face down on my chest and me reflecting, that same dog started barking.  Even before the dog started barking, I was thinking of it and what really does that dog symbolize.  In mind, I was seeing the dog as a symbol of life and of like creation.  I was thinking of the awesomeness of genetics and the power of DNA; how it's amazing that with just an altered arrangement can produce different living forms.  That barking sound is a result of biology, physics, and chemistry; life.  Not just life, but love, as well.  A family, or at least one person loves that dog.  That dog is a symbol of companionship.  I'm sure it's family considers it a member; that dog symbolizes family, too.  I realized that there was a truer, deeper power in the things that I find irritating because they may be disrupting my comfort, my status quo.
From irritated to in awe-fully amazed, inspired, and humbled simply through the process of changing the lens in which I view.

From this, I feel good.