You ever have the morning or the afternoon or evening or maybe the whole day all planned out, and then everything falls apart?
Nothing goes according to plan?
What do you do?
How do you react?
Yesterday, I planned to go in the morning to practice some pole vaulting. Sunday morning is a good time to practice. Get in some reps. Work on the ol’ technique a little.
Well, on Saturday I went out and covered a feature story assignment for the newspaper and had a lot of fun, but it was a fairly hot afternoon and apparently I let myself get a little dehydrated and that night, my normally fairly-manageable restless leg syndrome condition was out of control. My legs were nearly spastic at times, and as a result, I got almost zero sleep.
I went to bed the first time around 10:30 Saturday night, and gave up trying to go to sleep about 10-15 minutes later. The next time I went to bed was 4:30 a.m. and I think I passed out for a little while, but I was back out of bed before the sun came up. Needless to say, trying to pole vault Sunday was out of the question.
I was like a damn zombie.
I knew I didn’t have the energy or strength to even try to pick up a pole, and if I did go and try it, there was a really good chance I’d wind up injured.
So I just laid around the house all day, laying on a bean bag chair on the living room floor, watching TV and dozing off for a few minutes here and there.
Feeling a lot better today, thank goodness.
Despite all that, there was a bright side of sorts to the whole fiasco.
Even though my Sunday plans were ruined, something positive came out of it.
That newspaper assignment I mentioned was covering one event — a reunion of old Army veterans who had not seen each other in 40 years — but I was asked to write a different version of the reunion, including photos, for three different area newspapers.
I planned to write one of the stories Saturday evening — which I did — and then write one of the others on Sunday, and the third on Monday. Well, guess what?
I got tired of watching TV about 2:30 Sunday morning, so I fired up the ol’ laptop and knocked out all three stories.
So, what’s the message here?
Go with the flow.
Things don’t always go according to plan, but if you look hard enough, you can probably find a silver lining in every dark cloud.
Am I right?
