Oops…I meant to put this up yesterday

After the whole we’re-not-closing-on-our-house after all issue, a good friend helped me turn my negative thought process around by telling me, “Don’t think of it as something that has happened TO YOU; think of it as something that has happened FOR YOU.”

She’s a wise one. Not only did she shock-wave me out of my pity-party, she gave me a column topic which I’m always in need of! Here it is for this week. Enjoy!

It’s All in How You See It

Published in the May 20, 2009 issue of The Tribune.

After getting some hard-to-swallow news recently, a friend e-mailed me to say, “Don’t think of it as something that happened to you; think of it as something that happened for you.”

It was the same line I dish out frequently — the idea that everything happens for a reason — but her spin was more original. It caught me off guard and made me rethink my situation.

When I received her e-mail I was smack in the center of my disappointment and frustration. I wanted to fume. I wanted to find blame. I wanted to let my ego stomp around and make a bunch of nasty door-slamming, fist-pumping noise.

If you have read anything I have written in the past, you know that I try my best to practice rational, clear thought. Just a couple weeks go I wrote how it works best to, “Go with the Flow,” (that was the actual name of the column). But every now and again my ego checks out because it has had enough of me. It wants its own stage to display its own juvenile emotional outburst. My ego was not in the mood to reconsider what had happened. It wanted to punch someone.

“ … it happened for me,” I thought to myself while sitting at work trying not to sob. I repeated my friend’s line until it sank in deep enough to start considering how I could re-frame the event and see that it happened in my favor.

“SEMANTICS!” my ego screamed. They were just words, it told me. I should be mad. I should rage. I should send nasty e-mails and make angry phone calls to everyone involved. I had been wronged and there was heck to pay. “This hasn’t happened for you — are you crazy? This happened to you, TO US!”

I was at a crossroads. I could delete my friend’s e-mail and pretend I never read it. I could throw red-paint in the face of every meditative thought I had ever om’ed through (imagine me sitting on the floor, legs crossed, middle fingers touching thumbs, and the slight whisper of, “oooohhhhhmmmmm” escaping my lips just before getting hit with a big Sissy-Spacek-style bucket of pig blood).

Or, I could be my very own Zen master and embrace what had happened and the people involved. I could let go of the anger and the resentment. I could be at peace with the idea that I did not see the big picture or what the universe had in store for me.

Was my entire line of thinking was flawed? Was everything just a turn of phrase? What if my everything-happens-for-a-reason, go-with-the-flow agenda was simply a matter of semantics? I was questioning my foundation. Was everything just words?

And then it hit me. So what if it was just words? What if life isn’t about what happens, but how you interpret it? What had happened had not just happened to me. It was a turn of events that affected many parties. Some people involved I had not even met. On the surface, it was an unfortunate matter of circumstance. But I can’t see the whole picture because the whole picture is still happening.

The proverbial crap-happens bumper sticker (usually stated in more crass terms) is life. The things you want to happen sometimes don’t. On my good days, I know that what I want and what the universe wants for me doesn’t always converge on the same road. On my bad days I want to chuck it and hitchhike to another road. But in the end, the event is still there; the only thing I can control is how I see it.

“Thinking of it as something that had happened for me,” were just words, but words mean everything. Sitting and dwelling on why something happened left me in a pit of despair (now imagine me on my knees, arms stretched out, palms turned up, looking to the sky, wailing, “Why, oh why???”). But that didn’t get me anywhere.

I can’t control the why of things, but I can alter the sitting and dwelling part. And that’s why this event happened for me. To remind me that there are bigger plans in place; that everything does happen for a reason, even if the reason is to reinforce that very line of reasoning; that it is not what happens to you that matters, but how you see it.