Tag: blessing in disguise

Good News, Bad News

One constant I’ve come to rely on in life is universal truth. Certain stories circulate and resurface regularly on our radar because they hold wisdom or guidance that all humans can relate to. Writers who tap into universal truths often present more resonant stories because there are nuggets of truth relevant to all human experience.

A universal truth is something that resonates with all humanity. It’s something that others can relate to and/or can be a lesson that we’ve learned. We may sometimes recognize something as a universal truth but are not always able to understand it initially. Thus the belief that time increases wisdom as we see a universal truth repeated in different contexts over our lifetimes.

Universal truths reflect something essential about the human condition or key events in people’s lives, including birth, death, emotions, aspirations, conflicts, and decision-making.

Universal truths help us understand life better and also help us deal with emotional and psychological challenges. We may come to realize that much of what we encounter in life is not entirely what it seems at first – good or bad.

When my friend Anrael Lovejoy recently published a post about an old Chinese proverb colloquially known as the “Good News, Bad News” story, I was happy to be reminded of it. https://anraellightheartedvoice.substack.com/chat/posts/a0da9da1-bc2f-4207-92d5-75eee44a4344

For more context into its Asian origins, I present the story below as I found it on the internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_old_man_lost_his_horse

The story is about a Chinese farmer who loses a prized horse (bad news) but the horse returns to him with many other horses (good news). His son breaks his leg trying to break one of the new horses (bad news). Then war erupts, and due to his impairment, the son is passed over for conscription (good news). And so it goes, in perpetuity.

We might recognize the essence of this story in our own culture as the platitudes of “clouds with silver linings” or “blessings in disguise.” The story becomes relatable when you apply it to situations in your own life.

For example, we are mid-move. A heinous process as many transitions are. So much upheaval and stress and not being able to find things and disrupting routines accompanied by a general disintegration of one’s sunny and steady personality. Speaking personally.

This week, a fridge was delivered and meant to fit between two existing cupboards. The fridge was a half inch too wide to fit in the assigned space. The modifications required to make it fit would have been amateur and tacky looking. Accch! We gave the problem twenty-four hours. And voila. We decided to take out the dysfunctional existing cabinet and plan to replace it with one that will be much more useful to our needs.

Earlier in the move, our painter tipped over a full gallon of dark blue paint on a light brown carpet. Acccch! I watched in horror as the deliciously dark paint seeped across and into the carpet. The funniest part was me bolting in a huff to a hardware store to buy “cleaning” products to remove the stain. Ya. That’ll happen. I returned the unneeded products the next day.

The solution? The carpet was eventually taken up and replaced with laminate flooring. It is a much more hygienic and sensible long-term outcome for our health and comfort. Our lungs won’t be aggravated by dust whenever we walk into a room. The “disaster” became a gateway to a better solution.

You may be thinking those changes cost money. You would be right. But here is another universal truth. Anything that makes your living space more comfortable and practical is an investment worth making over the long run. These changes add value. That is a win in my view.

In the case of both the ripped-out carpet and the dysfunctional pantry cabinet, the replacement will serve us much better. Our initial bad news became good news longer term.

Writer Rudyard Kipling summed up this phenomenon in our culture in his legendary poem, If, published in 1913. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If%E2%80%94 “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, And treat those two impostors just the same.”

One element of learning necessary lessons to achieve maturity, Kipling suggests. I most heartily agree with him.

I’m Such A Hypocrite

Do I present as someone who is cool, calm, and collected? Most of the time? I try to. Well, I am here to tell you, I am a fraud. I aspire to be one of those “too cool for school” kids. I consistently fail.

Seeing a massive blob of dark navy oil paint on a pale brown carpet in the bright light of day in my “brand new to me” house set me off. Remember yesterday when I said how calm, cool, and collected I was over this little “accident?” I was either delusional or lying. I was actually livid.

Here is what I hate about “mistakes.” They inevitably cost time, energy, and money. How much depends on the magnitude of the mistake. Murder someone, get caught and you’ll likely end up paying with your life for the rest of your life.

Car “accidents” alter the course of people’s lives. In horrific and tragic ways. I have experienced those tragedies with people in my very own circle. The outcome is – as in the wake of all accidents – there is aught to do but pick up the pieces, work at healing, and try to put life back together. Irreversibly altered.

By comparison, a square-foot indelible blob of navy blue in a piece of carpet paint has cost me very little. But it has cost me. To start, the carpet has to be taken up and trashed. In the immediate aftermath of the accident, I worked frantically with water and paint remover, and cleaning spray to remove the blob. That now bemuses and saddens me a little bit. The fate of that carpet was sealed at the moment that paint can fell over.

So the initial “move-in” plan was to get the rooms painted – bippity, boppity, boo. Painting would have taken a day or two. Then the carpet cleaners were to come in. I was going to give the carpets a day or two to dry really well. Then – when the carpets were practically desiccated – the furniture could be moved in.

We would sit in our new living arrangement and “ooh” and “aah” over our new digs and hoist a glass of bubbly together to celebrate. I don’t see that happening now for a month.

The next week will be filled with getting on the phone to make appointments with other painters, meeting up with them, getting estimates, and deciding among them before the job even starts. That’s at least a week.

I’ll be schlepping back to the hardware store to get more paint plus carving out time to be on the job site to “supervise” people. Clearly, I should have supervised this job, too. I just told my concerned husband my mood would improve when this situation improves.

As I often do, I am looking for the lesson in this very minor disaster. Good parents teach their kids a lot of little life lessons in the safety of their home environment before they are launched in to adulthood.

Children should be encouraged to make a lot of little mistakes when they are young so they don’t make them again when they are established adults. It is the rule of “the hand on the hot stove.” If it happens once when you are a child, it is unlikely to happen again later in life unless there are copious amounts of alcohol involved.

The consequences of adult mistakes are often much harder to unravel. The emotional and temporal costs are hard, too, but harder to put a price tag on.

So in the wake of this screwup, I am looking for the “blessing in disguise.” We have decided laminate flooring is the way to go in the now carpeted areas given our lifestyle and lackluster housecleaning chops.

My dear friend and architect Diane – who knows just about everything there is to know about houses and job site screwups – gave me a boost when she sent me a message saying: “Hey, maybe there is hardwood underneath the carpet!”

Unlikely but it gave me a chuckle and a glimmer of hope. Sometimes that is enough to get you through inevitably difficult life patches. Friends rule.