Make It A Great Day

Sometimes posts land in your lap. They come to you as if you were sitting in a taxi on Highway in Sao Paulo with guy who just jumped out because he was about to pee his pants. 

Sometimes they quietly tap you on the shoulder and quietly whisper, “Don’t get bitter, get better“. 

That sparked a memory. 

Once upon a time I taught 4th grade. The school I taught in televised their daily announcements every morning. Thanks to our vice principal, they always ended with,

Make it a great day. Or not. The choice is yours.

In our lives, the run of the mill, ordinary day, this holds true. Imagine if every little thing that went wrong in our day, ruined us for the rest of it. 

Crash often gets upset or angry over the littlest things and I ask him, “Did getting angry solve the problem? No? Then there was no need for it.” Granted, there are times when getting angry is necessary, when it will solve your problem. But the other 99% of the time, calm patience wins over. 

Is it a problem or is it a challenge? Problems create stress. They ruffle our feathers. They cause us to lose our patience. We twist more, we push more, we hammer harder. 

If we find our Zen we find that sometimes a whisper is louder than a shout. Sometimes gentleness is stronger. Sometimes the anger just isn’t worth it. If you make your problems into challenges to be solved, you can rise above them. You can solve them with ease and understand that it’s not the way you planned it, but it still works. The world won’t end because things didn’t go exactly as you envisioned they would.

Rise to the challenge. Make the change you need to make to solve your problem and move on. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do about it. Flight just got canceled? They don’t give two nickles how angry you are about it, they’re not going to uncancel it. Kids just dumped cheerios all over the backseat? Anger won’t clean up the mess. Employ the patience when it’s Kool-Aid or cheesie dust. 

If you read yesterday’s nonsense post, you know I had pretty much nothing to write about it so I wrote nonsense. I could be bitter about it. Why did I post nonsense when I could have posted nothing and just written today? Because sometime our practice, our training requires us to be subpar. We learn more from our failures than our success. Successes are much sweeter, though. Reflect on the failures to make your best better. 

Problems beget problems. However, challenges create champions. Be a champion. Or not. The choice is yours.

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We Hit the Trails

This morning started when Crash and his friend, who was here for a sleepover, woke up at 5:30 am. Ugh. They didn’t go to sleep until sometime between 10:30 and 11 the night before! Oh well. I seriously can’t wait until Crash decides that sleep is actually a good thing. But that’s for another post.

Anyway, by 7:30, Bang was also up and all three hooligans were fed and were looking to go outside. But the sun wasn’t even up, yet! And it was only 7 degrees! (they were in shorts and t-shirts) So I got them dressed properly and I took them to watch it come up. They were bored at first. Then the first glimpse of the sun came peeking through and they thought it was pretty neat.

Later that afternoon, after Crash’s friend had gone home (which was a bit sad because he’s moving away next Monday night) Crash and Bang were bored and the only thing they could find to do was pick fights with each other. Instead of strangling both of them, I took them for a hike for an hour and half. Immediately upon entering the woods the bickering and fighting and screaming and stomping stopped. I know this was a pleasant relief for DW whom we left at home to relax.

There were bridges to be crossed (no Trolls were hiding under any of them). There were trees to see (none of which resembled Treebeard). There were streams to throw rocks in and stairs to climb and benches for sitting on. There were sticks to be carried (to fend off the dragons) and leaves to be collected and mud to stomp through (shoes need to be washed now. You told me so, DW!) There were squirrels to hear and watch. There was a dog and it’s owner to stop and chat with. There were pictures to be taken…

     

It felt good to be out on the trails. The air was cool and quiet. No one was on anyone else’s last nerve. While there aren’t as many deciduous trees as I’d like, not as much vibrant fall color with all the loblolly pines, it was still colorful, bright, and full of October.