Don’t be afraid of your shadow

It’s Groundhog Day, the traditional day when Punxsutawney Phil emerges from hibernation and either sees his shadow (six more weeks of winter) or not (early arrival of spring.)

In “Groundhog Day” the movie, Bill Murray plays a TV weather forecaster who finds himself trapped by the weather in Punxsutawney, and gets caught in a time loop where the days repeat themselves over and over.

I found a remarkable essay on the movie at the website Transparency (http://www.transparencynow.com/groundhog.htm). It says in part:

Whereas most of us go semi-automatically through most of our (very similar) days, he (Murray) is forced to stop and treat each day like a world onto itself, and decide how to use it. In the end, he undergoes a breakthrough to a more authentic self in which intimacy, creativity and compassion come naturally - a self that was trapped inside him and that could only be freed by trapping him.

Your true self – the one ready to do something different – may be waiting on the other side of Groundhog Day. You don’t really want to climb back into your hibernation, do you?