It’s raining on my picnic!
What do you do when you make fantastic plans and they all go wrong? What do you do when you plan for a romantic picnic and it rains?
Like anything in life, we have a choice, we have a choice in how we respond and react.
Surprise stress, and I call the above surprise stress, can leave us feeling like we have no control over our own lives and no control over our own happiness. It can really suck!
As humans we like to control our events, sometimes people in our surroundings. Think about it, this happens every day. For example, we control the air conditioner and the heating systems in our cars and in our houses. I know that may not feel like control. Losing control, having our decision-making taken away from us by other events that we have no control is extremely frustrating. Like dealing with Covid. It is a sense of helplessness that can create issues affecting our mental health.
This weekend my husband and I wanted to go for a picnic.
The forecast was unpredictable for two days and we decided to wait for Sunday to see if the weather improved. The fun part about picnics is planning the food, preparing the food packing the food and heading out for the adventure. Obviously, we cannot control the weather and midway through our picnic it started to rain. Now at this point, there were choices to be made, do we quickly pack up our picnic and head home or do we carry on with our picnic under an umbrella?
I am thankful that we chose to enjoy our picnic, coffee and sandwiches, gluten-free cookies and dip under the safety and dry umbrella. Yes, it was lots of fun and a much-needed positive distraction.
Each of us has come from her own life experiences. None of us have had a perfect childhood with perfect parents and effective communication skills.
The good news is that we don’t have to repeat those negative patterns and we can re-create strategies that give us resilience in life. Like positive self messages, positive self-talk and positive distractions.
Positive distractions?
Positive distractions come from knowing that you have a voice, the voice that speaks up is also the voice inside your head. Think about the message you hear from yourself. Are they positive or negative? You see it raining you wanna have a picnic what do you say to yourself are you all gloom and doom or do you focus on what you can do to have fun in spite of events in life.
So much depends on her attitude we can switch from negative to positive, takes awareness, practice and self patience.
“It’s not how far you fall, but how high you bounce that counts.” —Zig Ziglar
Failure and disappointment are inevitable parts of life, yet difficult and challenging to deal with. We all face moments when we don’t achieve our goals despite our best efforts. We may not find our dream job or soulmate, it may be too late to have more children, or the house with ocean views may be out of reach. Relationships may end despite our best efforts to save them, friends or lovers may betray us, we may not get the promotion we worked so hard for, or our children may not be as motivated as we want them to be.
Face the truth of the situation, Allow yourself to mourn lost dreams,don’t get stuck feeling like a victim, check if your expectations are realistic, be kind to yourself, look for the silver lining, be willing to try a different approach, find your grit.
During the picnic, we navigated through all eight. Was it easy? Not at first but we did it and enjoyed our day! We are all facing our own challenges. Each of us is doing the best we can base on her life experiences, coping skills and comfort zone. Quite often bullying, violence at home or in the workplace, neglect, depression, and unhappiness in relationships wear us down and we lose resilience in life. Chipping away at our self-esteem. The good news is we can re-learn that positive attitude, we can bounce back with resilience when we trust in our own abilities.
The only person we can change is ourselves. The only person we can make happy is ourselves. This is empowering knowing that we do have a choice in how to react, how to respond to what we retain.
The next time you plan something fun and we have the unexpected, decide how you want to react, decide how you want to feel. Never give up, believe in the power of your voice and the inner voice of positivity and keep trying to make life as enjoyable as possible.
You never know what adventures await you when you move past negativity, look beyond failures, disappointments and embrace the challenges as well as the power of a positive attitude and keep handy the umbrella!
