Tag: attitude

The Long Joke

Posted in humorTagged , , , 76 Comments

“Your attitude is either the lock or the key to the door of success.” – Dennis Waitley

The lead up to this joke happened 13 months ago. I know because I blogged about it on Sharing the Heart of the Matter. Here’s the setup:

“This past weekend we were packing up to leave the vacation place we stayed at for two weeks. My nine-year-old daughter, Miss O, was helping my friend, Eric, put the rubber raft away. He’d purchased the raft for this trip so he had the original box.

After deflating it, they rolled it up and then Eric said to Miss O, “It’s never going to fit back in that box.”

And Miss O retorted, “Not with that attitude. Let’s be like Mommy and at least give it a try.”

And when I asked if it fit, she replied, “It would have but when he thought I wasn’t looking, he went and put the pump into the box first.”

She recounted this story to me at bedtime the night before we left. Eric must have heard her voice (and my laughter) float down from the bedroom. When I came down after closing the door he laughingly said, “For the record, it was never going to fit back into the box.”“

We mostly forgot about the raft until a couple of weeks ago when my kids and I went looking for sports equipment at Goodwill. My kids have never met a sport they didn’t like, or so it seems. My compromise with them is to buy used sports equipment. And we’ve found some great stuff there.

Like on this last visit, when tucked under a washtub for pets and an old lawn mower we found the exact same raft that Eric had. Miss O was so excited and said, “text a picture of it to Eric.”

.

Eric’s response, “They must have had a great attitude.”

I’m still laughing. Wishing you all a great week and a fantastic attitude. 🙂

(featured photo is Eric’s markup on the original box)

You can find me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wynneleon/ and Instagram @wynneleon

I host the How to Share podcast, a podcast about collaboration – sharing leads to success.

I also co-host the Sharing the Heart of the Matter podcast, an author, creator and storytelling podcast with the amazing Vicki Atkinson.

The horrible, terrible, no-good, very bad day

Posted in loveTagged , , , , , , , 69 Comments

“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.” – Pema Chӧdrӧn

On this past Saturday, we had a horrible, terrible, no-good, very bad day.*

Cooper the dog, had some potty accidents that we discovered. A couple that I found and cleaned up first thing in the morning, and a couple that Miss O unceremoniously stumbled upon. Ewww. Apparently, Cooper had GI issues after his surgery to remove the grass from his ear on Thursday.

We found some bugs in our pancake mix.

Then nine-year-old Miss O saw that the vines in Rusty, the crested gecko’s enclosure had fallen down. On closer inspection, we’d been misting too much and the whole enclosure was a swamp. So, instead of our to-do list chores, we spent all morning rehabilitating Rusty’s setup.

[Side note: We called my niece to get some advice. She’s the one who gave us Rusty. Miss O told her that we’d gotten Rusty out of the enclosure by saying, “We executed Rusty.” We quickly clarified that we’d evacuated, not executed, Rusty.]

At a kid’s birthday party, five-year-old Mr. D got hit in the head by a water balloon thrown by an 11-year-old boy who had been spitting in the ballons before hurling them.

Our tap water turned brown.

It was literally one thing after another. Some things caused by us, like Rusty’s enclosure. Some things that were random like the water turning brown. Some things caused by other humans like the water balloon.

There is probably nothing that peeves me more than life messing with my efficiency. I was not in a great mood, but I’ve learned from experience that rough days call for leadership, even when I don’t feel like it.

At one point in the day, Miss O exasperatedly said, “This is awful. I don’t know what to do!”

So, we talked about my dad’s approach to just find the next right thing to do. And we took comfort that what we did have to respond to “life” with was each other. We were doing pretty good job of sticking together.

Then as the kids were getting ready for bed, a huge lightning storm came in. Seattle very rarely gets thunderstorms so this was a rare and incredible show. After they brushed their teeth, we snuggled in my bed with all the curtains open and watched the storm.

It was fitting. On a day that seemed extra “life-y,” to let the storm and rain exhaust itself and pass on through. In that way, we weathered the storm.

(featured photo from Pexels)

*Title is a riff on the children’s book, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judy Viorst

Rose-Colored Glasses

Posted in meditation, UncategorizedTagged , , , 45 Comments

“You know what’s funny? When you look at someone through rose colored glasses all the red flags just look like flags.”- Wanda Pierce

This was previously published on 7/27/2022. Heads up – you may have already read this.

A few weeks ago I had plans to take my kids to a wedding in Leavenworth, WA a couple of hours away from where I live. On the day we were to leave, my stomach hurt. I chalked it up to a deli sandwich that I’d eaten the day before and loaded the kids into the car anyway. My only concession was to bring a can of Ginger Ale to calm my stomach but I judged my ability to go and take care of two young children was fine because that was as bad as I was going to feel.

I’m a congenital optimist. That is to say, I don’t work at having an optimistic attitude and it took me at least 40 of my 53 years to figure out how deeply my outlook is colored. And even that is an optimistic estimate because I’m still working it out. There are a few things that my optimism has categorically gotten wrong:

  • Dating: Nothing in common? No problem, I just figure that makes it interesting.
  • Traffic: Despite living in a metro area with consistently bad traffic, I always go with the low end estimate of travel time.
  • Weather: When it’s raining, as it does often in Seattle, I think it’s great because that means it going to stop when I want to go out for a walk.

The Ancient Greeks inscribed “Know thyself” at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. I’ve found that self-awareness to be a powerful tool to help correct for my inclinations. Specifically, to help me peel back the rose colored layer that my mind adds to pretty much every scenario. It helps me to add 15 minutes to my travel time, dress appropriately for the weather and realize that I don’t need to sign up for every date.

Even as I’m optimistic that I’ve learned how to adjust for my optimism, life presents me with new opportunities to be self-aware. As I traveled on that trip with my kids out of town, my stomach pains got worse and I had a couple of sleepless nights crammed in a hotel room with my 2-year-old and 6-year-old. Now I realized my optimism had told me that how sick I was when I first got the symptoms was as bad as it was going to get. Oops!

Fortunately, it wasn’t all that bad and I just needed to power through getting us home safely. And since optimism has signed me up for a lot things I think are going to go great and turn out to require a lot of resolve (I can think of at least 2 mountain climbing trips in this category), I am plenty experienced at powering through.

Mark Twain said, “There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist, except an old optimist.” Maybe that’s because if optimism hasn’t killed us before we reach old age, then it’s poor form if we haven’t figured out that it’s all a trick of the mind. I don’t think my optimism is going to ever go away but when I see it now I laugh and say, “Hi, Old Friend!”

(featured photo from Pexels)