January 21, 2015

Nothing Worth Doing Is Ever Easy

Eat Pizza and It'll Make You Feel Better (Or Something Like That!) 

"Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck."— Dalai Lama

Twitter sometimes can bring a smile to your face. This quote which I read early this morning while checking my feeds reminded me that even though things sometimes don't go the way we want them to go or even the way we plan them, it just might turn out to be okay.

I often say to people when we are faced with obstacles or adversity or even just simply the proverbial bad day that NOTHING IS EVER AS EASY AS IT SHOULD BE. I really believe that. Despite our best attempts to prepare for the best and expect the worst, life has a way of playing tricky games with us.

Being an eternal optimist, I always believe that the best is yet to come. The different rough periods in our lives teach us an prepare us for how to handle things and get us ready for that next step. Currently, my parents are getting ready to go to Florida for the winter. Let me quickly recount the steps this has taken.

  • They normally leave in November or December — early December at the latest. 
  • My cousin was getting married so they postponed leaving until after the wedding on January 10. 
  • The furnace in their house went out a day or two after the wedding but before they were scheduled to leave. This was a good thing because they would have had some damage to the house if they hadn't been home and the furnace died. 
  • The Lexus will not fit on the new two dolly that my dad bought during the summer. They decided they had to take the other car with them. 
  • The furnace went out again — but before they left. 
  • And a couple of other things … 
  • We were able to meet them for breakfast a couple more times and even introduced them Paesano's Pizza in Traverse City, which in 35+ years of living up north, they had never been to! 

Life is tough but that's why we live it. My wife Lori said to me last night, "You know we can't control other people's decisions but we sure can control how we react to them." That sums up the obstacles that we face. Things are thrown our way all the time. It's our reaction that matters. I always taught Courtney and Amber that ATTITUDE IS A LITTLE THING THAT MAKES A BIG DIFFERENCE. I hope they learned that and developed good attitudes about life.

"You can't always get what you want / But if you try sometime you find / You get what you need." — The Rolling Stones

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