Quite a lot of Bad Stuff has happened over the last couple of months. For me, personally, that is. There is Bad Stuff which happens that you just have to deal with (such as people dying), and Bad Stuff which you have a shot of changing. Now, no matter what, no matter how hard you try, there are things which are never going to work out how you wanted them. We can't win all the time, if you like. What matters at that point is how we deal with the outcome, and how we let it affect our lives.
I spend quite a lot of time talking to brides about the weather on their wedding day. Many brides spend the days and week approaching the big day terrified that the weather might be awful and ruin the wedding day. Well, guess what. The weather can't ruin your wedding day, only your attitude towards it. (Well, I'm not specifically counting tsunamis or earthquakes, but we're fairly short on those, luckily, in Britain). So yes, I come prepared for all kinds of weather for those wedding days, we have a Plan B, and everything will be OK in the end, as long as you relax and just EMBRACE what nature gives you.
This is pretty much that same with the Bad Stuff that happens in your personal life. For example, one of the things I've been dealing with recently is an school admissions appeal. Our little boy didn't get a place in our village primary school, even though we live literally 0.3 miles away from the school gates. We knew that children had been admitted on appeal before - in fact, that all appeals had been successful before - and that the school had a plan in place to deal with additional admissions without breaching the law. So, I spent hours, days, weeks, preparing our appeal. We went to the hearing, knowing nothing was sure, but confident that we had an excellent case. We gave it everything we had. And yet, the appeal panel still ruled that we were not due a place as the school would be oversubscribed. Even though, it wouldn't be.
So, that's a good example of Bad Stuff which happens that you give your all to dealing with, but in the end, you just have to suck it up. I was devastated for about an hour afterwards. I had desperately wanted my little boy to go to the village school, and now I had to explain to him why all his friends from preschool were allowed to go there whilst he wasn't. But. after I'd had a good old pity party for an hour, I realised that this wasn't about me. I had to make this negative into a positive. In fact, I had to make this The Best Thing That Ever Happened, so that my little boy would be so excited about starting 'big school' and meeting new friends that he wouldn't worry about the unfamiliar location or about what his existing friends were doing. And that's what I did.
And, I do believe that things generally work out for the best. It's going to be September, of course, before he starts school and we get a real feel for how he's going to settle in, but so far I'm really happy with the school he'll be going to (in a village a couple of miles away). In fact - *let's whisper this* - I might actually have come to prefer it. It's my job to make sure he does, too. And yes, he won't be able to walk home from school with his friends, or any of that stuff, but if he's happy, then perhaps those things that I thought so important aren't, after all?
So if you're dealing with Bad Stuff that isn't going your way, perhaps 'your way' isn't the way it's meant to go. There are a lot of quotes out there about this subject which make a lot more sense than I do, but one of my favourites is 'happy people focus on what they fave, unhappy people focus on what's missing'. Maybe what you perceive as being missing from your life isn't actually important, in the end.
