I was talking to a casual friend at a party and he told me about his recent camping-trip-gone-wrong. He explained to me how, on this three day excursion, he went from one snafu to another.
To begin with, his truck wouldn’t start and he had to wake up a neighbor to get it jumped. Next, he forgot some groceries, but before it was too late, he managed to find a small store near his last exit. Then when he was setting up his tent, he realized that he was short one tent pole, but he managed to improvise with a broken tree branch just before the weather came in. Finally, on his way home and in desperate need of gas, he came across a service station and coasted into it on fumes. To him, the whole trip was a fiasco with one mishap after another.
On our way home from the party, I told my wife about his trip and what a disaster it was. I was expecting her to agree with me, but she choose to view things differently. Her interpretation was……”Wow! Luck was on his side. His guardian angle must have been watching over him. He ran into all of these these potential problems that could have completely ruined his trip, but then…in the nick of time…it always worked out.”
Her comments got me thinking. How many times have I viewed a near miss as a bad thing rather than seeing the blessing in having it not happen? Probably more than I care to mention.
For example, I am writing this postal the airport in Philly, it is early in the morning and I have been doing seminars up and down the East Coast for the last five days. During this trip, I took the wrong exit in my rental car several times, followed my GPS directions to the wrong hotel 45 minutes in a different direction and got stuck in a major traffic jam, nearly missing one of my events. I can choose to concentrate on these things or I can choose to concentrate on the fact that I had a few unexpected adventures but everything worked out in the end.
I am going to take a page out of my wife’s book and choose the latter.
How about you? How do you choose to view things, half empty or half full?
