The strangest thing happened the other day. I was raking leaves.
Period.
Just kidding.
But I haven’t raked leaves since I was a little kid, so that was kind of strange—or maybe it was 5 or 6 years ago, for just a minute. I have some fuzzy memory of a rake within the first year of living in my current house. But the simple act of me raking leaves was not the strangest thing that happened the other day.
The strangest thing that happened was that within less than five minutes of raking leaves, I found myself thinking something I never thought I’d think…
This is why people use leaf blowers!
Suddenly, I realized why leaf blowers are amazing things.
I finally understood their true purpose. I finally felt my hatred of them disappearing. I even, sort of, maybe, just maybe…wanted one.
This was shocking. And liberating. And it made me laugh.
You see, although I don’t consider myself a hateful person in general, I have always hated leaf blowers. H.A.T.E.D. them, with a passion. The sound of them activated something really uncomfortable in my nervous system. Totally jarring. So annoying. So disturbing. They’d immediately piss me off and put me into a bad mood. It’s been such a big trigger at times that I sometimes wondered if in a past life I was killed by a leaf blower—or while one was making noise in the background.
Maybe. But probably not. They are just so annoyingly loud, and I am super sensitive. Plus, oftentimes I’d see people using leaf blowers when it didn’t even seem like there were enough leaves to blow to warrant making such an awful noise—and for so long! Why do leaf blowers take so long and appear to be doing so little? It just doesn’t make any sense!
Before I go down a rabbit hole of complaints about leaf blowers and slip back into hating them, let’s focus on this shocking transformation and how I went from hating leaf blowers to sort of wishing I had one. And why it matters.
What’s the point?
Why am I sharing this?
Because it was not just a funny and liberating moment for me, standing out there in my yard with a rake feeling as if I’d just experienced some sort of miraculous healing in terms of my relationship with leaf blowers (and the people who use them). It said more to me about change.
Change is possible.
Sometimes our most stubborn opinions and judgments and our habitual reactions can change in the blink of an eye, most unexpectedly. Sometimes it just takes hearing something in a different way that finally gets through. Sometimes it takes an experience to shift things. Sometimes it takes something like therapy, prayer, and/or energy work. It doesn’t really matter how the change happens. What matters is that it’s possible.
Anything is possible.
I think about possibility a lot, and I’ll be sharing more about that soon. But a week or so before this leaf blower realization occurred, it was on my mind in terms of certain people’s ignorant and misguided support of such an awful president (who, thankfully, will soon no longer be president), and that it’s possible that some day, some of these people just might see the error of their ways.
And while thinking about this, I stumbled upon a video called “Former neo-Nazi removes swastika tattoos after unlikely friendship”. You can click here to watch it if you want to. It’s an interesting story. And it gives hope. It shows that anyone can change, even the most ignorant, most hateful types of people.
If some racist white dude can have a dramatic wakeup call that results in him removing a bunch of stupid, hateful tattoos, and if I can go from hating leaf blowers to appreciating them and even kind of wishing I had access to one (but some special kind that’s extra quiet— is that a thing?), then anything is possible. People can change. They can recognize when they’re wrong. And they can change for the better. Love can wake them up. Love can dissolve hate.
Not to say I love leaf blowers now, but I do feel a sense of softening, a sense of acceptance. Although it’s possible that hearing leaf blowers will still rattle my nervous system, I’m no longer going to get mad at whoever is using the leaf blower. I get it now. Raking can be fun. But it can also suck. So, leaf blowers serve a useful, helpful purpose. And I’m sorry for hating them—and their users—for so long.
And although I feel healed of my need to dis leaf blowers, I still gotta share this funny video with you: Why Everybody Loves Leaf Blowers, from JP Sears’s Awaken With JP. Enjoy!