Take a different view

Sometimes I get to practice what I preach. Other times I have to eat my words. You, too?

Yesterday morning my fiance tried to fix a problem with my computer. He spent a considerable amount of time—with no luck. He's good with computers. So I knew if he couldn't get to the bottom of the problem, we needed to take it back where I just bought it. We did. This definitely was not how we'd each planned to spend our Monday!

We drove the 45 minutes to the computer store, got our name on the waiting list for help and spent a few hours wandering around a strip mall until our number came up. We were both pretty impatient, knowing our to-do lists at home weren't getting any smaller. Then John said, "You know, let's look at it this way: We're getting some more time together to just hang out. Let's enjoy the day." It was a sunny and beautiful day for wandering in and out of stores, and we really did enjoy some time together not working on whittling down our to-do lists.

Reframing. I talk about it a lot. And sometimes I'm able to do it quite well. Other times, such as yesterday, I wasn't in the mood to reframe—initially. But it really helped to do so. And we did have a good day together.

And, so far anyway, the computer is working. That's frosting on the cake.