Behold the Stars

Like all other parents, I tried to teach my daughter the lessons I’d learned or wish I’d learned. One of those lessons was how to deal with mistakes, failures, detours, and problems. I tried to teach her that it’s our response to a mistake or failure, rather than the failure itself, that matters. “There’s no use getting angry over mistakes,” I’d tell her, “Just adjust and fix the problem.” As an example, I taught her to work her artistic mistakes into the picture, rather than to start over.
It all came back to me one day as I was driving her to school. She was about three years old and still strapped into a child seat. Thinking of other things, I missed the turn to her school, which would now require me to backtrack through side streets to the main road. I grumbled and griped as I began the process of getting us back to the right road. As soon as I had made my first turn, from the back seat came a small voice saying, “Don’t worry, Daddy. I wanted to go this way today.” Suddenly, all my lessons came back to me, and I broke into a smile. It seemed that my four-year-old knew the lesson better than I.

I think of that these days as I look over the progress of my life. It hasn’t always gone as planned for me or many of the people I know. I’ve spent years mourning bad decsions, failures, betrayals — you name it. I lived as though the life I was living wasn’t the life I was supposed to live, as if somehow those other paths would have assuredly led to happiness and glory.

But those other paths are fairy tales, and they could just as easily have ended up less like Galinda the Good Witch and more like the Wicked Witch of the West. More likely, though, my life would have progressed in a way similar to my current one: some good things happen, some bad things happen. Just because you were betrayed doesn’t mean that if you had never met the betrayor that things would have gone along swimmingly. Just because you lost the chance to have the one job you wanted most, doesn’t mean it would actually have been the right one. How many times have you heard the story of someone who realized at 35 that the career they’d always wanted was not, if fact, all that great after all?

The lesson for me is to live the life I have, and not to compound the unpleasant parts with some fantasy of what “should” have happened. In fact, my life is the way it should be because that’s the way it is. It should be what it is. If it should have been otherwise, it would have been. I’ve been blessed in a million ways. Just because I wasn’t blessed in the ways I thought I wanted (I’m not even remotely rich) doesn’t mean I’m not blessed.

So today, as I find myself taking another detour, I’m going to take the time to find what’s good and interesting about this new — and unexpected — path. You know why? Because today I wanted to go this way.

Make a great day.