Spilled Glasses

Every once and again, there will be a day when you wake up and everything seems to be going wrong. Things are breaking, people aren't calling, or even worse, people ARE calling, you get chastised for everything, and your self esteem seems to be lower than the I.Q. of a hockey ref. (Which, for those of you who don't keenly follow hockey, can be surprisingly low, like "I get paid disability from the government" low.) And so what does our good old psyche do on days like these? It over-compensates. That's right, mister insecurity shows up. We start to believe that restoring the equilibrium by taking to one extreme will somehow get us back to a point of balance, and we start to over-compensate. Now, my fellow homo sapiens, we all know how this ends up. It ends with us realizing that we're not going to make it anywhere with this attitude and we just have to suck it up and wait for tomorrow to come.

Bad days happen. It's a fact, and anyone who says otherwise is either an infuriating optimist, or a seller of novelty "self-help" books, and they should be hanged by the United Association of Self Knowing and Educated Downers. Yes, there is supreme merit to the idea that we are in fact in control of everything around us, but death, accidents, disease, meteorites, and depression can fall on all of us. But just because death happens, does not mean we need to cling to life, just because an accident happens, doesn't mean we shouldn't drive on the streets anymore, just because meteorites fall from the sky, doesn't mean we shouldn't go outside  anymore, and just because depression can come in the most inconvenient of times, doesn't mean we should watch endless reruns of "The Best of Oscar the Grouch." The truth is, the harder you try to hold on to water, the quicker it slips right through your hands. We dedicate so much of our time trying to BE something, trying to STOP something else, and trying to CHANGE another, that we miss the mark by hanging on too tight. Life is going to happen, it is going to happen fast, and it is going to happen regardless of our indignation. The best things we can do are: find a focus, prepare for the future, and be mindful of others. 

Focus on the things that make life easier. There are little quirks in every day, even the bad ones, that make each mishap suddenly fade from memory, there are people that we can talk to, people that we know and love that are willing to listen to our proverbial insights, pedantic pursuits and antediluvian arguments. Sometimes, we find a listener in a lost friend, maybe a familiar stranger, and more often than not, the newest person that has entered our lives. 

The only preparation we can really do for the future is to store up. Store up those good friends, store up good memories, and store up the idea that it's summer now, it will be winter, and summer will come again. Make sure your storage is full and well stocked, because someday someone may need to borrow a little bit of your hope. In that we become mindful of others. Especially in my culture, I've realized that we live off of the idea of favors. Favors have such a negative connotation now, that we think giving favors, or owing favors somehow puts us in an obligatory state to the other person, either to redeem or withdraw. But the nature of favors wasn't meant for an odious and indelible stigma. A favor was an opportunity, it was the idea that we honor and respect one another and look out for their well being, even if it meant never receiving compensation.

 We have bad days, others will have bad days, their days will happen on our days, and our days will happen on other days, but we established society to overcome the chaotic, and to let it overcome us is to make obsolete our civility. So consider how hard you are trying to be something, stop something, or change something, and perhaps rewrite your course of action. After all, if you can't grasp it in your hands, it must be placed a philosophy in a tea cup.