Looking Up


I’ve been feeling stressed and like nothing is going my way because my job at Home Health Marketing was getting nowhere. I used to have at least 12 patients a month, and now I didn’t even have a quarter of those numbers. Some months, I had no patients at all. I was trying to look for another job, and my friend suggested auditioning as an extra instead of for parts. As an actor, we can go months with no auditions, so I tried to go online to find jobs as an extra, but there was nothing either. I feel like God was testing my patience and my endurance.

No matter where I looked, I felt that I was in a box with nowhere to go. No matter how hard I pushed against the walls or try to break them, they were solid, and I couldn’t move them. I only hurt my hands trying to do so. In the end, I just sat down with tears on my face. I’ve never felt so hopeless or helpless. I wanted to shout, but I didn’t even have the voice for it. I wanted to cry, and I still couldn’t speak, but tears started pouring. I just wanted a job. I didn’t ask for much, so why was it so hard?

These thoughts consumed my energy, like acid dissolving at whatever I was hanging onto. Eventually, I decided to give up. I put my head down for a while. All of a sudden, I saw a light on the ground. I looked up, and sure enough, above me, there was no ceiling. The box was open all along. It looked like someone was coming down with a rope to get me out of there. I felt like I was lifted out of it. With that light, I gained strength.

I decided that I would visit a doctor as part of my job. When I went in, the receptionist told me that she had sent me a patient a few days ago. I didn’t know that because my office hadn’t told me. Suddenly I was filled with energy, and I had a smile on my way out of the doctor’s office. While I was driving, I got a phone call from my acting agent. Her voice was full of excitement. She said that I got a callback. I thought, “That was a miracle, how could I get a callback so fast when I had only auditioned an hour ago?” She said that this was even better – this was for a movie I had submitted a tape for. I was more than excited; I was exuberant. It was so difficult to get callbacks for movie productions because they would try to get the best people from all over the country. I stopped my car and opened my sunroof, looking up at the blue sky. I told myself, “Get out of the box. Stay out of the box.”

Look up, and the box will not constrain you.

As long as I’m outside of it, the walls of the box can’t cave in on me. Yes, I can look up, and I will be lifted there. I will gain my freedom and my hope. I will achieve anything.

As I finished writing this article, all of a sudden I was reminded of a quote from the author of the novel The Moon and Sixpence, explaining the title of his book: “If you look on the ground in search of a sixpence, you don’t look up, and so miss the moon.”

Through the title of the book, the author, W. Somerset Maugham, transforms the words “dream” and “reality” into the image of the moon. Yes, indeed, if we do not look up, we will miss the moon – our dream which may one day be realized.

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