The Perfect Timing Issue

Have you ever had days when your life is like a crime scene that requires roping off until all the victims have been treated and the wreckage is cleared away? When everything goes wrong from the time you get out of bed to the time you crawl back into bed at night like a whipped dog to lick your wounds? Like when you lose your temper and tact and accidentally hit Reply instead of Forward with an angry commentary on an email you received. Ouch. Or when your cell phone makes a “pocket call” and someone (like your boss) overhears your inane conversation in a bar. Ouch. Or when your skirt gets tucked up into your underwear when you leave a public bathroom, not realizing it until a waiter tips you off. Ouch. Or when someone you know gets a promotion or an award and your Inner Bitch can’t stop growling with envy. Maybe it’s a day when all of this happens in a cascading torrent of bad to worse. Ouch ouch ouch. It’s tempting to believe that Mercury is in permanent retrograde or that our global timing is seriously off as friends lose jobs, polar bears perch on melting ice, bills are harder to pay and our leaders fiddle while our 401(k)s burn. Maybe the stars are out of line, or maybe we’re long overdue for hard times. Whatever the reason, it’s all too easy for me to brood, to become convinced that we’re living in the worst of times. When this happens, fear becomes my ruling planet and I forget that this is my only time, that I need to take delight in something every day—especially the dark ones. Unfortunately, when life gets tough I’m always convinced the sky is falling, so I require daily practice at staying grounded. Preparing for adversity is a lot like staying in physical shape. I need to work out rain or shine to have a strong body, and I need to work at finding a daily blessing, no matter how small, in order to have a resilient spirit. Since I’m a gadget freak, I’ve found a way to do it on the fly by using the Gratitude App on my iPhone (I’m grateful 24/7 for my iPhone!). For instance, I can have a particularly happy fortune-cookie message, take a photo of it with my phone and instantly paste it on the page. Or I could be stuck in an airport, fuming and furious, and suddenly realize there’s a Starbucks on my concourse. Snap, snap, snap. It’s so easy to forget these small grace notes or ignore them altogether. This way I have an ongoing record of the tender mercies that are there for all of us if we pay attention. We all have our own versions of Crime Scene Days, but tomorrow is always another chance to get it right, or at least, less wrong. And sometimes less wrong is all we can ask of ourselves and the world.