Watching for Potholes

Every so often, we’ll be humming along, things are going well, stressors are relatively small, worry has taken a backseat and life is, well, good.  “Your blessings are many and your troubles are few” according to a longstanding Irish blessing.

Maybe it has to do with having a few years of life experience, but when I’ve had too many of those easy going days in a row, I begin to start waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Because that’s the natural rotation of life, correct?  A life’s journey is like a road that is sometimes wide and smooth and straight, but also contains areas of tight switchbacks and steep hills and valleys.  When we’re on a nice long, straight stretch of highway, we cruise.  And then we hit a series of potholes.  Those who traverse Spokane County roads this time of year know all about those.  

I had one of those pothole days yesterday.  None of what happened was a giant train wreck, but it had a lot of hazards and little fender benders along the way.  The day started with our furnace dying in the middle of January and just continued to have splashes of unpleasantness scattered throughout.  When you start the day freezing cold before you’ve even had your first cup of coffee, you might have a clue that it could be a challenging day.  And it was.  All day long. 

I began to feel the irritation and impatience churning like a slurry in my gut.  And the worst of it was that I was home alone and couldn’t even vent or take it out on someone else.  The best of it was that I tend to clean when I get grumpy so at least the day was not a total waste.  By the time my husband walked in the door, I had adjusted my attitude to a mild simmer. 

At one point in my afternoon, I recognized that I needed to take a break, and even though I was already cold, I stepped outside, closed my eyes and took some deep gulps of cold, clean air.  I cleared my thoughts and exhaled all the grumbly irritation.  A young whitetail doe wandered past.  I could hear the trickle of a small stream of unfrozen water from our backyard water feature.  Suddenly the events of the day seemed a little less critical.  I was reminded that “this too shall pass” and that there were still things in the day for which to be thankful.

This will not be the last pothole day.  We fall into them on a fairly routine basis.  Hopefully we remember to just breathe, let the churning go, and remind ourselves that things will work out.  Life lessons can sometimes present in the form of a broken furnace.  But the lesson really is that we can own our responses to the potholes so that maybe they just become speed bumps that we can slow down and navigate without major damage to our peace.  And maybe, with a little extra focus and attention, we might even be able to avoid some of the big ones.