It’s Just A Little Snow

There’s a huge blizzard heading for The House on the Hill, Modern Philosophers.

It’s supposed to be so bad that they’ve already delayed the start of the work day tomorrow.

A few years ago, such an impending storm would’ve sent my stress levels skyrocketing.

I’d be checking the weather every few minutes, freaking out about having to drive in the blizzard, and then worrying if I’d be able to get the car up the driveway and into the garage once I finally got home at the end of the day.

The fact that I’m calmly sitting on the couch and writing a blog posts speaks volumes about the progress I’ve made.

Sure, I’d rather not have to spend hours shoveling tomorrow, but I choose to think of it as my cardio for the day.

Driving isn’t the paralyzing, white knuckle experience it once was now that I’ve upgraded from Zombie Car to a RAV-4.

I’ve come to accept that there’s nothing I can do about the weather, so why sweat it?  I’ll leave such things to my arch nemesis.

Growing is important.  There was a time, basically, the first dozen years after my divorce, when I was a lost cause.  I was only getting worse, and making no effort to improve my standing in life.

I’m not sure what clicked, but I finally started to care about the fact that I’d become a mere shadow of my former self.

I’ll probably never overcome the plethora of phobias and quirks I’ve accumulated since my marriage ended, but I would like to put a dent in that number.

Yes, there have been more changes than no longer fearing snow.  While I never shy away from talking about my life (although I might camouflage the sharing in thinly veiled blog posts), not everything is up for discussion.

What I will say, because I want others to be encouraged that it is possible to improve, even when you are ridiculously stubborn about the concept of change, is that I recently had an experience that normally would have crushed my spirit and had me rambling on about the dark clouds.

Instead, I found a way to turn it into a teachable moment, and learned to look at it from a perspective that put a positive spin on it all.

I suppose it’s never too late to rethink the way you play the game.

Perhaps I’ve been stuck in a rut of forced perspective.  Whenever something happened in my life, my default setting was the find the negatives, dwell on them, and then question why things never seemed to go right for me.

Now that I’ve spun the wheels on the kaleidoscope, I’ve noticed that not every failure has to be a negative.  I’m not going to get too deep here, because I’m craving chocolate and want to tie this us to go in search of some, but not every setback is a bad thing.

But what the hell do I know?  I’m just some guy sitting on his couch, petting a purring cat, and ignoring the blizzard that’s about the rock my world.

Talk to you soon…