This was a week of huge negatives, intermittently sprinkled with a few positives and yesterday seemed to set out to prove the point with early morning disasters like the AC failing and locking my only set of keys into the office. Then an hour or two later I was celebrating the good news that Finn didn’t need a third operation, with the vet confirming that he is healing well.
Earlier in the week I experienced what to all accounts felt like a stroke, only for the brain scan the following day to put me in the all clear.
It seemed impossible to count on anything going in a particular direction and by the time yesterday evening arrived, I was looking forward to going to bed and calling it a day early.
Then as I was rounding up Everest, the last of the five office cats, she drew my attention to a lovely visitor that was in the corner of my yard. I would never have noticed Mrs. Brisby’s daughter. She was standing quietly in the corner trying to be inconspicuous.
My cats will often stare off into nothing that I can see and most times I have resigned myself to understanding that they see spirits that my eyes don’t. But this time, Everest picked up the beautiful deer and I managed to get a few pics of her which I have at the end of the blog.
Then when it got dark, some significant lightning started going on outside, so I grabbed the camera and headed off down to the ball-fields to try to catch it. But as soon as I set up the camera on the tripod, it began to pour unmercifully on me. The camera was getting soaked, the lens was splashed with so many raindrops, that attempting to dry it off was merely a joke.
So, rather than abandoning the whole idea of trying to catch some lightning, I sat back in the car and tried to shoot some off-tripod. The lens was still getting wet, but not completely destroyed and I was able to get some shots (water on the lens making some of them interesting). I put them at the end of the blog too.
Then before I was finished, the car battery died (don’t ask me how) and I had to walk home in the rain, which thankfully had lightened off a bit. We have a car starter and I charged it overnight and walked it down this morning but that too failed. So, then I had to call Carrie at 7 am and she drove almost 45 minutes to help me jump start the car.
To cut a long story short, that didn’t work either, so I had to remove the battery and we drove to an Auto Zone and picked up a new one.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the two set of pics and the whole back and forth of bad-good-bad-good really left me thinking for today’s blog that while we seek consistency and for things to run smoothly, they often times don’t.
How we handle this roller coaster can honestly determine the level of happiness that we experience on a daily basis.
Some people will focus on the negative experiences and this can have a seriously profound impact on their state of happiness.
Others will moan about the negatives and get caught up in an effort to correct them.
But the truth often is that good or bad, many of these experiences are outside of our control. And therefore allowing yourself to get frustrated or bothered about such experiences, is pointless in the extreme.
There is nothing we can do about them and therefore there is no learning or corrections to be made on our part to avoid them happening again in the future.
If there was something we could modify that would stop them from happening, then that would be a moment of personal growth. But getting upset at the rain because you went to the trouble of setting up your camera on the tripod and now have to retreat from it, is nonsensical.
You could argue that I should have been more careful with my office keys, or monitored the AC better than I did, or had the battery tested in anticipation that it might fail. But sometimes, shit just happens.
You can cry about it, get angry, feel the whole world is against you, or you can just acknowledge that, regardless of how we might try to control it, life just does its own thing regardless.
I chose this week, to focus on some of the amazing positives; Finn not needing the operation, my brain being ok, Teresa (Mrs. Brisby’s daughter) visiting the yard and posing for me, and finding a high-visibility jacket in my car for the walk home on the dark country road.
Yes, life is a roller coaster and we have to deal with the lows if we also are chasing the highs.
At the end, it will become a simple flatline but until then, enjoy the ride!
… just a thought.
