August 25, 2010
How Fortunate
You know, fortune cookies would be a lot more believable if you got a bad one every now and then. Nothing horrifically doom and gloom, mind you. Just the occasional “You’re going to incur some unexpected expenses.” or “Good friends are indispensable; too bad one of yours is about to split.” Otherwise, all you need to do to improve your circumstance is to order out for Chinese.
Similarly, you need to have some rough patches to appreciate the good. If there were no bad times, there wouldn’t be any good times, either. They’d just be… times. Its a difficult thing to acknowledge and embrace when you’re in the middle of a rough patch, though.
On the other side of things, though, when things are going well, the last thing I want to do is think about bad times. But it’s just as important to remember where you’ve been as it is to look forward to what’s ahead. You need to look back on the less than stellar times and appreciate them and how far you’ve come since.
I’m in a pretty good place right now, and the most palpable way for me to appreciate it in the midst is to remember when it wasn’t quite like this. If I only think about the here and now, I might not even realize how good I have it until I’ve moved on. And sometimes, that little mental acknowledgment is enough to promote a “time” to a “good time”.
Let them roll.
like.