Good/Bad Thing

My old car died this summer. Over ten years old with well over 100K miles. So now I don’t have a car and that’s a bad thing.

But it died just a few miles from home about a week before I was going to drive to a wedding a couple of states away. If this had happened while I was out on a highway hundreds of miles from home it would have been terrible. I’d have missed the wedding, would’ve had to find another way home and would’ve had to deal with a dead car in another state. So what I thought was a bad thing at first was actually a good thing.

Yesterday I cracked a tooth. This is a very bad thing, and painful.

I called my wonderful dentist and asked her office manager when I could come in. “NOW!” was the answer. My dentist was leaving for vacation for two weeks starting tomorrow. For various reasons I’d been putting off this dental work that I knew was necessary and if it had disintegrated a day later I would’ve had to go to whoever was covering for my wonderful dentist (I’ll give you her name if you need someone in NYC). So my tooth breaking on the day it did was actually a good thing.

Bad things happen. We rarely see them as the proverbial blessings in disguise. I’ve been using Zipcar and driving nice new cars instead of a bucket of bolts with almost 150 thousand miles on it. I no longer worry if the vehicle I’m in will make it back to where I started. My tooth has a temporary fix that my wonderful dentist (did I tell you she’s wonderful?) expects will hold until we can do the necessary work on my schedule.

Knee-jerk reactions to situations are often, “Why did this happen to me?” We need to learn  how to step back from our first reactions. I counsel a lot of people who’ve lost their jobs and their first reaction is usually panic, anger, depression or a pinwheel of all three. Most of the time within a few weeks these same people are saying, “This was the best thing to happen to me.” Because now they’re pursuing what they really want to do, or they’ve found a better job or they’ve just come up for air. They’ve taken the time to assess their situation, where they are in their lives and careers and made a pivot.

Give yourself the time to accurately figure out what’s really happened and then decide on a course of action. This is a skill to develop, it doesn’t just happen. It’s not a personality trait that some people are born with. Patience, paired with resilience, also known as grit (see my post of May 2016), are two of the keys to getting past clouds to the silver linings you deserve.