When the dog takes you for a walk, sometimes you meander down a new street. On that day, it was a nice, well-manicured, upper-middle class street. Big houses, lush flowers, bricked driveways and pink flamingos. Really? Reaaallly? Pink Flamingos? Oh, yeah, four houses worth. At one house, they were poised shyly with one foot up standing near the bushes. At the next house, they guarded the step leading to the front door. Two others brazenly stood in the middle of the lawn. At the last house, one peeked around a downspout while the other flaunted her trim body a few feet away.

Well, I remember when pink flamingos were the favorite lawn ornament. Growing up in Central Illinois, which bears absolutely no resemblance to a subtropical climate, I saw a lot of pink flamingos. If not flamingos, then there were wheelbarrows full of flowers and a wagon wheel or two—just slightly more appropriate to the location. But, that was decades ago; surely, that fad disappeared. Hadn’t it? I thought that today’s homes were happier sporting a Buddha, a turtle, or a gnome instead of pink flamingos.

Well, thoughts about lawn decorations pushed me towards a circuitous meditation of sorts. Although I am not given to lawn decorations of any sort, they do speak to the beliefs we might have, about beauty in this case. As I observed in my mental dialog, if they believe a lawn needs to be decorated, why didn’t they swap out the pink flamingo for a gnome or a Buddha? In my mind, those homeowners needed to dump, update and change this old belief that flamingos were still popular?

Actually, the lawn decorations are no different than some of the limiting beliefs that I put out for display and keep around long past their expiration date. Fear of crossing the street by myself when I was six made good mental and physical sense; but fear of driving across the continent at 36 makes neither mental nor physical sense. An old belief based on necessity gets reconstituted into a limiting belief that holds me back.

Many of the beliefs that we honor are little different that tying up a horse (or keeping a stash of pink flamingos in our storeroom). That is, having been trained to wait when the reins are tied to a railing, the horse will then stand quietly even though you might tie it to a plastic lawn chair. We’re not all that different from the horse. We train ourselves or allow others to train us to see ourselves as a limited human being, one without the courage or the love or the power to fly free.

You know, it is time to get rid of those damn pink flamingos!!