by Guy Spiro
from the publisher ofThe Monthly Aspectarian
I lived with my grandmother off and on during several of my formative years. This was one of the blessings of my youth. To say that she had a positive effect on me would be an understatement. I can still hear clearly many of her seemingly millions of sayings that I had little appreciation for at the time. One that stands out is her warning not to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire. She had noticed a tendency I had to make bad situations worse with a smart mouth and a bad attitude. I was pretty good at turning one day after school into three. Grandma's admonition to not jump out of the frying pan and into the fire served me well (when I followed it) through the rest of my childhood and adolescence and it remains good advice in the sense of not foolishly tweaking the nose of authority for no good reason.
Childhood is perhaps the most karmic period of life. As children we have no control over how the adults in our lives behave. We are at the mercy of forces that we have little understanding of. But as we grow older we become more and more responsible for the conditions of our lives. As we attain greater understanding of spiritual realities, we come to realize that as adults we are almost completely responsible.
As adults, the frying pans that we find ourselves in are of our own making, forged in our mistakes and misunderstandings. At times the heat becomes too much to bear and we are one way or another driven to make changes — and the fear of hopping out of that frying pan is second only to the fear of remaining in it. But here is where something wonderful can happen.
When a situation finally becomes intolerable and we ask for change to come, what often occurs at first seems to be worse that the condition we sought to escape. We find ourselves in the fire. What we need to understand about this is that it is the fire which burns away the problem.
Confronting our problems and mistakes brings them into our faces. No longer ignored, swept under the carpet or denied in countless ways, they seem to take on a greater reality than they really have. But this is just the process of purification that we need to go through. The fire burns for a while as what we feared comes upon us but on the other side of the fire is the release that we desire.
So what becomes apparent is that what we need to do is to jump out of our frying pans and into our fires as soon as we can feel ready. Grandma also said that we have to pay the piper and face the music and . . .
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