Eat a Frog

On a recent a rainy Monday morning, I was woken by the worst stink ever. It was if someone had hit me with the smell.  Immediately, I was sure that our sewer system, or that of our neighbor’s, had busted, broken, backed up. The stench only worsened with each minute and I couldn’t get out of bed fast enough, with a   “the- judges-would-surely-give-me-a-10!” bolt out of bed.  I have mentioned that I am not a morning, person, yes?

I ran out of the room into other parts of the house, to escape and of course, ask if anyone else could smell that awful smell. No, they couldn’t.

In utter disbelief, I checked both bathrooms, and then looked out the window to see if the neighbors had called a plumber. I was convinced I would find a utility truck of some kind out front. Surely, something was terribly wrong and without stopping to think, I was envisioning missing an entire day of work to deal with this mess, dollar signs dancing in my mind, imagining the cost of a plumber and any repairs, not to mention just the, well, the awful mess of it. In earlier years, when sharing a house with a roommate, something like this happened, and let’s just say, I had a visual on what was possible. Dashing around the house, my mind ran away with the problem faster than a speeding train; I was rearranging my day at work, trying to figure what meetings I could reschedule, who to call first, etc.

Not able to locate the source of this problem, I turned my energies toward getting my coffee {priorities}, getting my son’s lunch fixed {necessity} and then getting ready for work {duty}; still certain I had a major bummer of  a day on my immediate horizon. As I went into my bathroom, the stench hit me all over again. It was then, and only then, that I noticed.

With the first rain of the season, our backyard had become a sopping mess, and the two fur kids were apparently a bit confused and well, just not ready for the sudden change in our season. My sweet sweet little kitty [the same one who likes to sleep ever so near to me] had apparently decided to make the room that houses my commode her humble abode and the place to do her ‘business’ this fine Monday morning.

Locating the source of the stinky stench, all I could do was laugh. I realized that I had turned a small pile into a mountain of trouble without even getting to five minutes.  Clean up easy, stench was gone and the day back on track, mine again and no one the wiser and my wallet not emptied.

As I drove to work, after a stop for another cup of coffee of course,  I realized that the day ahead seemed so easy after that near debacle.   Just about anything after that would certainly feel easier.

And it got me thinking about expectations; if we assume things will be difficult, won’t they?

Later that morning, I was in one of my meetings, with a student who had requested the meeting to tell me that she’s moving on to an internship and will no longer be on my leadership team come next semester. She confided that she was nervous about telling me, and that she was trying to find a way to let me down easy.  And when I happily supported her decision, she realized she had been expecting a negative reaction from me, sure that I would be upset, angry even, and perhaps, worse, disappointed in her. When she realized that my reaction was not what she thought, and in fact quite the opposite, she said it reminded her of this quote:

“Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”

– Mark Twain.

So, then I had to tell her about my stinky morning escapades and we laughed at the shared experience of assuming the worst.

I remembered that in the last few weeks, on more than one occasion, someone came into my office and said, “I have a bomb to drop” or “I am sorry to tell you this”  followed up with, “do you have a minute?” My head swirling with all possible bombs – budget, jobs, health issues, all the really big stuff. In each case though, the issue they brought to me was so minor – so easily dealt with –  compared to what my mind had conjured in just mere seconds.

Expectations can have great control over us, sometimes even without our full knowledge that they are at work in our internal processing. We can jump to conclusions in mere seconds, and begin forming our reactions to the situation of which we really know very little, or perhaps, really, nothing at all.

Sometimes this works in the direction where the outcome is a sigh of relief and the feeling that we can handle whatever may come our way.

Sometimes it works in a different direction, where the outcome is a sharp feeling of disappointment, and the idea that things never go our way.

And, sometimes, it just might work best if we focus on the moment and suspend our expectations altogether, allowing what is come to just arrive as it does.

Some say to have high expectations, and good things will follow; how do you balance your own expectations when things go in a way different than what you expected?