I Got a C Minus in Trusting the Universe (And I Teach This Stuff)
My first conscious thought when I saw the jury summons in the stack of mail about a month ago was, “You have got to be kidding me?!”
Because after living in this county for only three years, I was genuinely flabbergasted that I was being called for the third year in a row.
I wish that my first thought had been some evolved, spiritually aware sentiment around how I consciously create my outcomes.
But after three years and three summons, it had started to feel like the Universe and the Clerk of Courts were in cahoots.
Despite the population swell of on of the fastest-growing county in the state of Florida offering many fresh citizens to choose from, I couldn’t buy myself a year off.
The first two years I didn’t have to appear, so I pinned the summons on the bulletin board at the back of my mind.
Part of the backbone of my business is a spiritual practice built around trust, gratitude, things working out for me, and believing that the Universe has my back.
On the spiritual plane, I simply hoped I wouldn’t be chosen for the “winning” team.
The Night Before (A Masterclass in Not Doing the Thing I Teach)
I refreshed the jury duty website for the 14th time at 3:52pm on Monday night, to find that indeed my number had been called.
Cue my mini emotional meltdown.
Texting with a friend later that evening about my summons, I got the first reminder that my bad attitude was my choice.
We were texting, or rather I was whining at him with my thumbs. My energy came through the screen, and he knew I was off energetically.
Drop your shoulders.
Take three deep breaths.
Reset.
I knew he was right, that I could choose to adjust my energy, but I was secretly ashamed that I had been called out.
And so I dug in deeper instead of taking his advice.
With full awareness in that moment of my option to course correct my attitude, I chose to continue the spiral straight through to bedtime.
And just to really seal the deal on a guaranteed bad night’s sleep, I picked up my phone and spent my final waking hour investigating the personal redemption arcs of two musicians I barely like.
The whole time, some part of me knew.
This is not helping. You are choosing this.
The Morning (Or: The Universe Has a Sense of Humor)
I had been to the old courthouse several times last year, during my exhausting divorce proceedings.
On most of those visits, I felt scared, deeply uncertain, and mistrustful of the process.
It was also frustrating trying to navigate a system that is dysfunctional and slow during its best weeks.
The energy of that building carried everything that had brought people there. You could feel it in the walls.
That deeply penetrating energy suck was what I was expecting this morning as I approached the building.
But consider me surprised that the three year old civic center was so clean and quiet it almost felt like Google Maps had failed me.
Plenty of parking. Modern bathrooms. The kind of building that makes you think, ‘huh, my tax dollars occasionally get used to do something correctly.’
I joined a small conference room with about 8 other people, jumped back into reading my summer reading list mystery, and waited an hour as the jury-sitter directed people to the bathroom on repeat.
My energy had recovered a little after finding out that the max trial was one day….no bonus days for me. That was a relief.
But I was still feeling pretty grouchy despite the fact that the universe had arranged an ease-filled morning for me, despite my personal pity party, sleep sabotage, and overall bad attitude.
I was too annoyed to notice.
The Judge (Three Minutes, Give or Take)
When they finally called us into the court room, the judge took a few minutes to explain how the process worked.
Why we were there, what jury duty means, how the system functions. He wanted the people in that room to understand what they’d shown up for.
I sat in the back corner and watched people actually lean in. Nodding. Genuinely interested.
And I noticed something shift in me, just slightly, as I realized that some of them actually wanted to be there. They were curious and/or found meaning in the civic weight of it.
I was just keeping my fingers and toes crossed that I was about to be sent home.
I got my wish and was in my car shortly after 9:00 AM.
The Awareness (In a Swimsuit, On a Porch, Slightly Mortified)
I got home just before 10am, in time to salvage what I had written off as a lost workday.
I changed in my “work swimsuit,” grabbed my journal, and settled into my spicy hot screened lanai overlooking the pool.
Gratitude for home welled up in me. I’ve spent years deliberately building my environment into the kind of space that cradles and restores me.
I hadn’t planned to have a revelation. I was just trying to get my feet back under me. And gratitude and journaling always helps.
But there it was, in my own handwriting from a few days before:
Everything always works out for me.
I read it. And my first thought was: that’s exactly what just happened.
Followed almost immediately by: so why didn’t I believe it?
Because if I’d actually believed that, my behavior would have looked different from the outset.
My reaction would have been significantly different. I wouldn’t have spent eighteen hours in resistance to something that turned out to be completely fine.
I’d written those words only 5 days ago. By Monday night I was acting like someone who had never uttered them.
That’s my gap.
Not between knowing and doing.
Between believing something when life is calm enough to write it in my journal, and actually trusting it when something arrives that I didn’t choose.
Now I can’t unsee my own pattern.
I’m working on something big right now in my business. I have a significant goal to hit that really matters to me, in a season that’s turned the heat up to 11 because of circumstances I couldn’t prevent or control.
But if the pattern holds, if I only extend trust to the things I chose, I risk white-knuckling my way through the exact season that most requires me to actually believe what I say I believe.
Jury duty, of all things, illuminated my pattern.
Everything always works out for me.
Even the parts I didn’t pick.
But do I really believe that?
Here’s what I’m sitting with now: I thought I believed it.
I’d written it dozens of times, said it out loud, built a practice around thinking that I believed it.
But a three hour civics lesson exposed the truth. I don’t currently believe it all the way to my bones. My head believes it’s true. But I still pick up the sword to fight the battles feeling like an army of one.
Which makes me wonder. Is there something you’re giving voice to, something you’d swear you believe, that a small inconvenience might expose as not quite bone-deep truth?
Not as a judgment. As an invitation.
Because sometimes the circumstances we don’t choose can show us more than the ones we carefully control.