Avoiding Knee-Jerk Negativity

I love fortune cookies and anything edible with a saying on the wrapper.  The other day I opened a chocolate that read:

‘Blessings only come to those who notice.’

Trite as it may sound, I am duty bound to tell you that this cookie spoke the truth.

What follows is a case in point: Years ago, we bought a rolling knapsack for our son.  It turned out to be rather poorly constructed and ripped within a couple of weeks.  The following year I spared no expense, yet within a month, the handle of the shiny new one, with the groovy wheels and many sections made of sturdy blue canvas, seemed to stop retracting.

‘Figures!’ my family cried in unison.  ‘Another rip-off!’ Now poor Harper was stuck trundling up and down the five flights of his turn-of-the-last-century elementary school with a paralyzed knapsack, its handle at full mast, rendering it unwearable.

Well, I happened to grouse about this in the presence of the school guard, who asked if I’d checked for levers on the sides… and yeah, you guessed it… They were small, but they were there; two tiny, retracting buttons! So there was nothing wrong with Harper’s school bag after all.

What was wrong, was that I was so ready to be ripped off again that I failed to look for a possible, much more obvious solution!  The moral of this tragic tale? Bad things happen to all of us, bum deals, rip offs, disappointments, losses.  Yet while good things happen at least as often, an expectation of the bad can easily become our default!  And guess what?  It creates a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Don’t let this happen to you!