Last week I had my Weekly Wisdom nearly written, in my head. After our morning walk Niko fell coming down the stairs inside the house and spent the rest of the afternoon afraid to come down again. The next morning as I sat down to meditate, I noticed a text from my Dad saying that my Mom had been rushed to the hospital after he called 911. Two days in a row that didn’t quite start the way I had planned.
I spent a bit of time with Niko that evening after his morning fall helping to calm him, and even telling him how brave and strong he is. I went to sleep with hopes that mother nature would prevail the next morning. And after greeting me with wagging tail, he eagerly walked down the steps and outside. Whew! These are times when not having any knowledge of the first seven years of his life is difficult.
That small victory was then met with the text about mom being in the hospital. Second time in less than two months. Both mornings were disrupted from my normal schedule. Both threw me off with concern about how I would handle them. And in both cases I had a choice whether to react or respond. Whether or not to let the unexpected events of the morning change the flavor and tune of my day.
I am a firm believer in not investing my energy in worrying and creating scenarios that stress me out. My goal is to stay in the moment and take one step at a time as a situation unfolds. It’s easy to get carried away and imagine the worst, but that’s just wasted energy when the “bad scenario” you’re imagining in your head hasn’t even happened yet.
I stayed calm, checked in to see how mom was doing at the hospital. She was stable and waiting to be admitted. I made a point that afternoon to get over to the hospital and check in. The next two days she was doing better and on day four they released her to go home with new instructions for dealing with her heart issues.
Some days your schedule just goes out the window. My Weekly Wisdom never got written last week because the priorities shifted.
How do you deal with it? Do you get stressed out about what didn’t get done, or won’t get done? And if you answered yes, how does that approach work for you? I’m guessing it creates more stress, more emotional responses and maybe more food or alcohol are consumed in a conscious or subconscious attempt to numb out.
Schedule crashers will never happen at the perfect time. The cool thing is you have a choice, you can stress out and resist things you hadn’t planned on happening, or you can live in flow, stay in the moment and deal with things as they occur.
