by Rebecca Elliason, M.S.
Weeks ago I made plans with a friend to go out for a night on the town. I was beyond looking forward to dining at one of my favorite restaurants (Va Bene- get the artichokes!) and catching up. I planned the evening well as we had limited time and lots of catching up to do. I stayed up late the night before working and had the busiest day so I could afford to take the night off. I got all dressed up and everything. My friend was supposed to pick me up at 6:30. He ended up leaving work a few minutes late and then got caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic for most of the way and finally got to me at 8:10. I got in the car, called the restaurant (my restaurant!) to learn that they close at 9 and we were still 10 minutes away and without a parking spot. Ok, it was a long shot but we drove over and thought we’d at least grab a quick bite.
“We’re sorry we gave your reservation away and are not seating anyone else tonight…”
With all due respect, we were nearly 2 hours late which made it hard to fault the restaurant for not taking us, and my friend just spent an hour and a half travelling to me so I really didn’t have anyone to blame. Nevertheless, this beautifully planned evening was fast becoming a complete wash. I had spent so much time and effort making all sorts of plans and reservations to be able to have a relaxing evening and as time passed we quickly missed everything. The worst part to me was that I was originally just excited for quality time, and because I was upset that all my plans were falling apart I was not that interested in the bonding experience. So silly!?
I took a few moments to reconsider. We literally missed everything I had planned – so what! I made a conscious decision – granted it might have taken me a few minutes to “get there”- that really all I wanted was quality time with my friend and so, in the end, we walked around the city and had a wonderful night. I had to realize that I couldn’t get exactly what I wanted and be OK with that.
Things go wrong all the time and so many things are out of our control. No matter how much I wanted the traffic to let up, I couldn’t make it happen. I could neither force my restaurant to stay open late, nor invent a legal parking spot out of thin air in this fine city. In spite of all this, I chose to accept my lack of control and go on to have an enjoyable night. Too often our need to control a situation gets in the way of our ability to sit back and enjoy life. Please let my first hand story be a lesson that no matter how much you stress or will everything to go right, sometimes it just does not, and that while we often cannot control what life sends us, we can control how we handle it.