06 Feb Power outages
Hard day. The other day. What I do for a living can be hard. Sad and frustrated by the beauty and fallacy of the human spaceship.
Then.
Shoe broke. Left backpack at a hotel. Sitter forgot to pick up my son. Scrambling to have someone go get him while in traffic on the Bay Bridge. Hearing him sob on the phone.
Dear friends rescued him. He is okay. Shaken. Okay. Cries a bit. We talk about people letting us down sometimes. What CAN we do. That we can do everything right and still, stuff happens. What did he learn from it? Etc. That stuff.
Get home. JAMMIES. Yay… then the day was not through with me.
Electricity kept shutting off at my house. Heater broken. Son very upset over being left at school. Tears. Freezing. IPhone broken. Broke my favorite glass. My son decides to play a plastic flute causing my nerves to fray…
Sit down for dinner. Slowly open a bubbly water. You know the kind of slow- so the air gets let out to keep it from exploding. The air comes out. Then…
It Explodes. Everywhere. Cold + wet equals freezing.
I stop. I look at Sebastian.
Sebastian and I laugh. For about 5 minutes.
He grabs a piece of paper and says, “Let me draw a metaphor mom.”
He draws the bubbly water going everywhere. Asks me how to spell:
“Sometimes you do all the right things and still things go wrong.”
My bad day just became my best day. The human I live with is just profound.
My day WAS all about that. I did all the right things and still…. things went South.
Life is like that.
The sad part is as humans our brain is in a habit to see it another way. When we do all the right things and it still goes wrong we:
BLAME: find someone to blame OR
SELF WHIP: use the moment to beat the hell out of ourselves
This habit is crippling.
What if there was no one to blame? Not THEM and not ourselves? What if stuff just happens and it is our job to stay resourceful and future focused? I feel at times that I get upset with life in such silly ways. Sort of like this: I’m playing in the waves and having a blast. Then a rogue wave crashes over my head, sends me spinning, gasping for air and swallowing a cup of sand. I do not know that I have ever stood at the shore and cursed the ocean for being what it is. I have a choice to stand on that shore or not.
I have a choice most of the time.
Yesterday Sebastian let me know what bad things happen so good things can happen. He got hurt at a friend’s house yesterday and about 10 minutes later my friend gave him Nutella. His 6 year old mind has decided that the two things are related. He kept talking in the car about how he notices if he loses a toy he loves – something good happens after. I started to explain that maybe the two aren’t related. Maybe things just happen. There there is no bad news or good news… there is just news.
He told me I was wrong. That good things always follow bad things.
I suppose they do. If I spend enough time splashing cold bubbly water in my face when I’m in blame mode I’m sure I’d see the good.
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