Well that didn’t take long.
As you might remember, my nonstop flight to Copenhagen – the start of my 2-week trip – was canceled a mere 24 hours before my flight was to depart. GULP.
Chaos and panic ensue. Enter – Alene’s harried look. Not how you want to spend the few hours leading up to your vacation.
As I mentioned before, the message is in the mess. And it is up to me to find that message. We as humans are meaning makers. We can make meaning out of anything. So I can choose to look at this as a huge annoyance and grumble and rage about it (check…), or (AND) I can choose to take something away from this, to learn from it.
Let me just be clear, this was an AND situation. There was plenty of grumble and rage.
And then there was time to reflect and look at it from all directions and see what I could make of it.
And here’s something I’ve made of it: I can deal with things.
Now, this may sound a little lame. Maybe even stupid. But here’s the thing – some time after we’re done being kids, I think we lose that familiarity with things going wrong all the time and dealing with it. We start to actually get good at things, we learn to navigate, we learn about consequences and how to head some of them off before they hit. And then we start to operate in a really safe, familiar, comfortable zone where we don’t actually make that many mistakes. And then we start to worry about what it would be to make a mistake and have to fix it. And I think at some point, we stop taking those chances, taking risks, or doing things where we can’t foresee, with some amount of certainty, what the outcomes will be. Don’t think that person will say yes? I’m not gonna ask them out! Don’t think that promotion is coming? I won’t even try!
With entrepreneurs, there’s a tricky side that says – not sure this is gonna work? Don’t do it until you know for sure it will! And let’s be honest…that’s just not something any of us can know, about ANYthing, not matter how smart or intuitive we think we are.
I can see where this shows up for me. Where I dawdle, thinking – I should just figure this out so that it’ll go right. And instead of DOING, I plan, and think, and hunt for possible consequences, and come up with Plans A, B, C, D, E……you get the picture. And in the meantime, nothing actually happens.
This mess, which ironically enough, had nothing to do with me or what I could have foreseen or planned for, reminded me – I CAN DEAL WITH THINGS. When sh*t goes wrong, I can figure it out. Why the F am I so worried about all these possible consequences?? Is it just the dread of thinking about dealing with them? Possibly. Or maybe I’ve lost my confidence that I can deal with them.
Enter: the Universe. Message delivered. Message received.
