In the winter we spend a lot of time in our slippers. Days are shorter, daylight is scarce. We tear out into the cold to empty the trash, but our feet race back in to find our slippers.
When our slippers go on, we don’t dig in our heels. Our shoes keep us a bit edgy, off our mojo, but our slippers remind us to slow down, and when we do, we seem to find out who we are again. One of the reasons we cannot find ourselves as quickly when we wear shoes is that shoes don’t know us as well. With slippers however, there’s an easy back and forth, a light conversation. We quit trying to stay on our toes. We loosen up and relax. We quit saying “I can’t do that I’m tied up right now.” The world grows warmer, and our walls come down. We open up and talk.
Slippers are the beginning of how the rest of our body wants to feel.
They are like comfort food for our feet. Not so much with shoes. And, to make matters worse, I grew up with some ridiculous rules about them. One rule was to always use a shoehorn when I put on my shoes so the heels would not be smashed in and ruined. The other rule was to always untie my shoes before taking them off. My grandfather, who I hardly knew, owned a shoe store in Cleveland, and barely scraped by during the Depression. Apparently, he passed these archaic shoe rules down to my dad, who clerked in his store. I did not clerk in a shoe store as a kid, but I still had to put my shoes on with a shoehorn and untie my shoes each time I took them off as if the Great Depression was still in effect.
Thus, I paced around nervously in my youth, tied up in knots over whether I was treating my shoes with historical respect. If I did not treat my shoes properly, my father would take the opportunity to lecture me about shoe damage, leading me to believe that we were all standing on the edge of another cataclysmic economic disaster. As a result, I thought The Great Depression was a painful period of history caused by mean-spirited people who had a lack of compassion for their shoes. It was if somehow history hinged on whether I kept my shoes protected and secure – like I was caring for a small child. Later in school, I falsely thought my father’s shoe rules would be enough to use on a history paper about the Great Depression, but when the graded paper was returned, the teacher had given me a D and scribbled the words “Narrow and Unpolished” in a small red box at the bottom. It was then that I began to wish all my shoes would turn into slippers.
Have you noticed that slippers never get sent back when they are given as a present?
That is because we love them right out of the box, even if they are a bit small or too narrow. If we do get a pair as a present and they don’t fit, we can have someone else wear them for a while to stretch them out. Or we get out a kitchen knife and cut out the little toe. No big deal. It’s a slipper. You slip them on, you share them, you slip them off. No rules apply.
We smash the heels down, we let the dog chew on them until we can get to Pet Smart and buy a real dog toy. We don’t make any commitments with our slippers, or take things personally when someone says:
“Oh, hi. Hey, I borrowed your slippers. They were a little small, so I cut out the big toe. Hope you don’t mind.”
No, we don’t mind at all, because we know our slippers are cool. They aren’t bothered by insignificant details. They accept, they flow, and they are accepted unconditionally. They are like a pet on your feet without the vet bills. We accept them, they accept us. We take them walking, we let the little pilings on them pile up, and we let them sleep right by our beds at night. They see our worst side, the side of us that gets sick, the side of us that gets tired, and the side that is sick and tired of being sick and tired. They see the side that goes _in_ the bathroom and the side of us that comes out. That may seem like a lot of pressure on something so light, but slippers don’t know pressure. God knows this too. He wears slippers all the time.
Slippers don’t know how to work, but they aren’t against it either.
They are masters at only taking on what they can handle. We are happy doing only half the job in our slippers, because when we put them on, we are not in work mode anymore. We are in slipper mode. We are not meant to shovel snow in slippers, but we can shovel the stoop. We can cook dinner in our slippers, but they remind us to stick to the simple stuff like grilled cheese and tomato soup, not stir fry with fresh veggies from the garden. We take out the garbage in our slippers, we walk over there to get a magazine in our slippers, maybe straighten up the pillows, but there is really nothing else to do once you get your slippers on. They are not work shoes; they are house shoes.
Isn’t it funny that we can have nineteen pairs of shoes, but only one pair of slippers? That is because one pair is enough.
I have no problem wearing someone else’s slippers, but I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing someone else’s shoes. Once in high school I was issued the shoes someone else wore the previous season for a sport I was playing. I knew immediately those shoes were going to make some poor choices because those shoes would be making someone else’s decisions, not mine. They would be making some other person’s steps_, not mine_. As a result, the first time I got the ball wearing someone else’s shoes, I ran the wrong direction and scored a touchdown for the other team. Looking back, I would have been more comfortable standing in my own endzone with slippers on.
Why is it we don’t like wearing other people’s shoes, but we have no trouble following other people’s footsteps?
That is not a good plan. We have to put down our own footsteps using our own shoes – the ones made for just us. If that doesn’t work, if those shoes get too big to fill, slide on your slippers. Relax. Throw away the shoehorn someone said you had to use, the shoehorn used one hundred years ago, the one from the Great Depression. It’s time to sink into your own self. Then, it won’t be long before you’ll get your footing again, become your own person. That is the soul your slippers have been waiting for.