So yesterday I realized I was almost out of diapers, and pull-ups were running low, too. For someone who wears one or the other to bed almost nightly, that's a problem.
Luckily, it was a fixable problem.
At one point in my day I got on my trusty smartphone, pulled up Bambino Diapers website, and placed my order. I was fortunate enough to have a nice big PayPal balance too, because a friend had recently paid me for splitting a hotel room recently, effectively cutting the purchase right in half. Awesome.
Until I noticed that PayPal still had my old address on my profile, and that was where Bambino was going to ship everything.
I noticed this just before I got on the road home, during a rainy commute in the dark. At one point, flipped out that they would ship it and it would be a mess, I pulled over, got on the website, and mailed them to fix it. Then when I got home, I mailed them again, and they quickly mailed me back, letting me know they'd taken care of it. I also fixed my PayPal profile too. Whew!
Later, as I was getting ready for bed (yes, putting on a pull-up, sheesh.), I got to thinking about the whole episode. People (this includes me) often vastly overestimate how badly a mistake is going to screw up their life. We panic. Fear-based visions fill our heads with how absolutely terrible something is going to work out.
But it's kind of bullshit, really. The truth is, we have almost no idea about how things are going to turn out. What looks like a mistake right now might actually turn out to be an incredible positive later on. We waste a lot of energy when we flip out. That's not to say we shouldn't flip out (I'm no fan of "should".) It's human to lose our cool. But we do have a choice for how long we perpetuate that tailspin.
On a long car ride the other day I was talking with a friend about that which is necessity. What I mean by that is those things which we are obligated to do or experience, and have utterly no choice about. After much contemplation on the subject, I've identified just three inescapable necessities so far:
- Existence
We were born. We exist. There's no arguing it, nor fighting it. - Aging
We age. Our feelings about it, resistance to it, embracing of it, are irrelevant. We're carried upon our aging like twigs on the surface of a river. - Death
Eventually, like all living things, we die. Period. I know, cheery, right?
But actually, it IS kind of cheery. Once you recognize that these three things are inescapable, everything else just becomes, well, optional. Broken things aren't broken forever, because there is no forever.
Once you've got that idea under your belt, then you can mindfully try to fix what you can, to the best of your ability. Embracing necessity doesn't condemn you - it makes you flexible, supple. It gives you a lot of options.
I'm grateful for that.