It Always Happens, Deal With It Differently

This seems to happen to me all the time. I woke up with my day all scheduled out, today was going to be productive. I finished my coffee and healthy breakfast and headed upstairs to clean up and begin my organized day, when the door bell rang. It was my neighbor asking if I had a set of jumper cables. Well, of course he also needed a jump, so I put on sweats and searched my mind where the cables would be. This would only take a minute, I thought.

Of course, the cables weren’t where I thought, but after a long search I found them where they should be — In the wheel well of the spare tire. Thrilled, I pulled up my car close to my neighbor’s, but of course since Suzy’s car is only a year old I had never popped the trunk. To get that accomplished I had to find the owner’s manual, find my glasses, and put on another layer of clothing. It is still cold outside.

The hood popped and I faced the next dilemma — no battery, or at least not one I could see. Back to the manual. Suzy’s car is so cool it’s battery is contained in a locked compartment. Back to the manual for a third time to only discover that after a lot of pulling and tugging on the compartment’s lid the batteries post aren’t accessible for jump starting without removing the entire battery.

At this point my neighbor was as frustrated with my lack of knowledge about my own car as he was with his dead battery. He suggested he’d have another friend come by to help. He’d just borrow my jumper cables.

I returned inside an hour after the doorbell rang, now my schedule was shot to hell, and I was in a fowl mood. In the past I would let this incident ruin my whole day, and I would take my frustration out on anyone who had the misfortune to cross my path.

Maybe ten years of meditation and prayer is finally is starting to help me react differently. As opposed to rushing to get back on schedule by skipping meditation and shortcutting everything else, I decided to do the opposite. I would breathe, I would spend some extra time in silence to restore the good feeling I began the day with, and I would consciously slow my world down until it stopped spinning out of control.

I remembered Suzy’s favorite saying: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.  Its attributed to Clair Booth Luce, and this morning I concentrated on the words during my meditation.

When my Yoga instructor stretches me into a concorted position she always says — remember to breathe. Not a bad idea when your day or life feels all stretched and out of whack.

About the author

Webb Hubbell is the former Associate Attorney General of The United States. His novels, When Men Betray, Ginger Snaps, A Game of Inches, The Eighteenth Green, and The East End are published by Beaufort Books and are available online or at your local bookstore. When Men Betray won one of the IndieFab awards for best novel in 2014. Ginger Snaps and The Eighteenth Green won the IPPY Awards Gold Medal for best suspense/thriller. His latest, “Light of Day” will be on the bookstands soon.

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