4. When the ball is over, take off your dancing shoes.
As a child, I used to hear my Aunt Linda say this, and it puzzled me a great deal, until the day I heard her spell out the lesson more explicitly. My sister, Vickie, had come back from a trip down south, full of parties and ‘southern hospitality.’ She was bemoaning the contrast with her job, her modest automobile and her day-to-day friends.
“Young lady,” our Aunt Linda said gently, “no one lives on the top of the mountain. It’s fine to go their occasionally – for inspiration, for new perspectives. But you have to come down. Life is lived in the valleys. That’s where the farms and gardens and orchards are, and where the plowing and work are done. That’s where you apply to visions you may have glimpsed from the peaks.”
It’s a steadying though when the time comes, as it always does, to exchange your dancing shoes for your working shoes.
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