A Cut Finger.
This morning I cut one of my fingertips, enough to draw a copious amount of blood, but nothing too serious otherwise. I’ve got a plaster on it, and I am confident I will survive.
But it does slow down my typing considerably. I don’t think this is a bad thing. It is an opportunity to slow down and think more deeply as a write instead of writing at my typical speedy pace.
This simple change of framing makes all the difference. I could be annoyed about the cut, and have a negative attitude towards it. Or, I could take whatever life throws at me, small or big problems, and find the silver linings.
I am not sure that there is any situation you can imagine that could not be, somehow, made worse. And in the fact that there is always further to fall, we can find some solace in the fact that we have not yet fallen that far.
The next thing to do is consider what opportunity any challenge brings along. At the very minimum, when something goes wrong, we gain experience. If that exact same issue were to reoccur again, we would be prepared. However, there are even more benefits. If challenges that are merely similar in nature occur, we can probably deal with those more confidently. And this is just a generic benefit of all challenges. Each specific challenge in life will also have its own set of specific opportunities and silver linings, we have to be in the right frame of mind to see them.
