Groundhog Day

by Wendy Perrotti

The cat woke me up this morning 30 minutes before my alarm – like he always does. I followed him down the stairs, fed him, made coffee, then started the shower, mug in hand.

This is our routine.

Today feels the same as yesterday.

It’s Groundhog Day.

And if you’re like me, the meaning of that forever changed in 1993.

Shadow shmadow .
Long lost is my interest in the rodent and his predictions. February 2nd has, for me, become an annual prompt to re-examine what my life is pointing toward.

You’ve probably seen the movie. Bill Murray plays a cynical bastard stuck in a small Pennsylvania town, cursed to relive the same day (Groundhog Day) over and over.

Like us, initially he holds tight to what he believes about himself and about the world.

Like us, he attempts to change his fate by taking actions that still allow him to preserve what he believes.

He accomplishes many new things each day, some dark and others heroic, but stuck in his old beliefs, HE remains the same and each morning wakes exactly as he did the day before.

Occasionally, one of his actions creates a shiny moment – one that shows him what he’s really yearning for. But foolishly, like us, rather than learning from it, he pushes to repeat it and it falls away.

He still can’t see that it wasn’t the action or the circumstance that created the shiny moment, but who he was in it, that altered things.

Only when he let’s go – when he starts to use the tiny moments of each day to build on the next – does he begin to notice that something feels new.

He is growing.

Brilliantly, the film doesn’t allow for this fledgling growth to produce big magic. His curse remains the same.

But now, the only thing that changes each day is him.

Until it isn’t.

And of course, that’s when the big magic happens.

When I woke up this morning, everything looked exactly as it did yesterday. 

But today is Groundhog Day and I can see how I’m growing.

What little things will you do today that make you feel the way you want to feel? What shiny moments will you capture and ask, “what about me created this?”