Ciao, bellas! I know it’s been a few Wednesdays! We are just returning from an incredible trip to the Eternal City—the land of gelato, ancient history, pasta carbonara and so. much. PIZZA.
It was the kids’ first European trip, and we were able to take my mom along, which made it all the more special!
I didn’t do many experiments while I was there (except for the one I do daily without fail which I will write about soon!), but my 10 year-old did come up something quite genius in the International Terminal before our flight took off that I’d like to share with y’all today.
It all started when our family was in one of those Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly moments. You know the old song, “She swallowed the cat to swallow the bird to swallow the mouse to swallow the spider to swallow the fly…”?
Well, we needed electronics to sit on the plane for 14 hours, and on the way to the electronics place we spotted a sign that pointed toward a Wendy’s, and because they’d closed the one in our town years ago my husband is always determined to go when he gets an opportunity, and because we had a few extra minutes, I said sure, even though I didn’t realize how far away it would be. Which is why and how we ended up tramping through the airport for many minutes in the opposite direction from where we needed to go to pass through security and walk to our gate and ultimately catch our plane.
I don’t know why she swallowed a fly.
Perhaps she was nostalgic for the chocolate frosties.
As we schlepped to the Wendy’s my 10 year-old caught a glimpse of my hardening face and slipped her hand in mine. She asked me what was wrong and I mumbled grouchily about walking incredibly far in the wrong direction just to get some food.
She brightened. “I know! Let’s think of 10 good things about the Wendy’s being far away!”
I started to open my mouth in protest, “No, 10 is way too many. We’d be lucky to name 3,” as I couldn’t think of even one at that moment.
But then I realized that the stretching ourselves to find more reasons was precisely the point, so instead, I laughed. “Ok, sure. Do you really we can find that many?”
She grinned. “Probably! You say one, and then I’ll say one, and we’ll count and try to get up to 10!”
We trudged on, following the red and white signs promising square cheeseburger goodness and taking turns naming reasons it was great to go so far for our lunch. We’ll get more steps on our Fitbits this way! We’re seeing new parts of the airport we’ve never seen before! We’re making our bodies even more tired, so we can sleep better on the airplane! We’re working so hard to get there, we’ll be even hungrier when we arrive!
By the time we finally made it to the counter that smelled of greasy salt, we were giggling and stretching to come up with something remotely new for number 9. “It’a good thing this place was so far! Because the longer you want things, the happier you are when you get them, because you’ve been wanting them for SOO much longer!”
While thoroughly delightful and epically memorable, our trip also included its fair share of unexpected disappointments and challenges:
—We spent the entirety of the 10-day trip without two of the five bags we checked, despite many, many hours devoted to tracking them down and attempting to retrieve them.
—The day of our Colosseum tour, our tickets were somehow used by another group and we had to stand outside for an hour trying (unsuccessfully) to get it resolved and eventually walk home in defeat without entering.
—The wifi and hot water both broke at different times in our accommodations and took multiple days to resolve.
Life happens. (Even when you’re on a dream vacation!) When it does, it’s helpful to have mantras or practices that can lead us back to a sense of perspective.
“We’re in gorgeous, delicious Rome! What could really be so wrong?” worked for us most days while on vacation.
But back here at home, aka “real life,” we’ve got a leak in our shower that needs to be repaired, and I’m pretty sure I’m the one responsible for the fact we have no leftover tile with which to fix it. (And yes, it is the hand-made tile that we had to send back twice to get the color just right!)
There are not 10 good things about this annoying problem. I didn’t even want to write about it in this Substack because I wasn’t sure I could find one good thing about it. BUT. The longer I sit with the challenge, the more chances I give my very resourceful brain an opportunity to find the “good.”
We’ve got a terrific contractor that we trust to do this work. We have resources and capacity to order more tile. We figured out where it’s actually leaking, which means we can fix it (this took many hours of labor by many different people so not to be taken for granted!). My husband was sweet enough not to be mad at me that we don’t have the leftover tile any more. I’m doing a fairly good job not beating myself up for going a bit overboard on cleaning things up after our remodel and losing the tile. (Yes, if you want to help me think of more “good things” you can throw them in the comments!)
It turns out, a search for 10 good things can help to remind us of our basic human resourcefulness (I can handle this!) as well our good fortune to live in interconnectedness with fellow humans (Other people are here to help me!).
Whenever I want, I can choose to see the “good” in a situation, the opportunities to practice my flexibility, my patience, my courage, or my empathy.
Perhaps the Old Lady was not at all concerned about that fly she swallowed.
Perhaps she realized she could always look around and find a few good things, no matter the situation.
Love this post! All about reframing our perspective . Thank you for the reminder