Adjustments

Normally, the alarm clock on my husband’s phone goes off at 5:30am. So when I rolled over and noticed my bedside clock said 6:23, I knew our morning would be off to a difficult start. I shook him awake, told him the time, and climbed out of bed to wake up our daughter. For me, there are few things worse than starting the workday by sleeping past the alarm and throwing my schedule all out of whack.  From the outset, I knew adjustments would need to be made.

However, I didn’t know it was going to be one of THOSE days.

In the chaos of trying to make lunches and breakfasts and get showers, I noticed that our home Wifi wasn’t working. My husband checked it and said that there wasn’t a reported outage in our area.  So maybe it was just due to the storms the night before and would get back to normal shortly. On his way out to work, he thought to check the internet cable running into the house and discovered our problem. We wouldn’t be enjoying Wifi at home that day.

The dog ate my internet connection. Chewed almost clean through on the OTHER side of the fence.

This was bad news. I had an important internet conference call scheduled in the evening, and my husband had band rehearsal after work. That didn’t leave much time in between him getting home and my call for him to fix the cable. And we weren’t going to pay the internet company their ridiculous fee to fix it. Plus, they’d probably tell me they’d show up sometime between now and middle of next week. So I sent the other conference call participants a quick message explaining the problem and letting them know I may not be on the call but would try to figure something out. Ok, second crisis of the morning averted.  Adjustments continue.

I decided that, since I didn’t have access to internet and couldn’t go about my usual morning routine, I’d make sure I had everything prepared for teaching my last stress management and music class meeting at the library. (Ha! See the irony there??) With the day going as it was, I thought it would probably be a good idea to double check my iPod and speakers. Good thing because my iPod was completely and totally dead. So were the speakers. Luckily, I had over an hour to charge them.

This was turning out to be quite the technologically challenged day! And it was only 8:30am.

It was at that moment that I realized I was being faced with an unusually difficult experience.  And the decision was mine regarding how the rest of my day went. I knew I had the power to choose how I responded and reacted from that moment forward. I could make an adjustment from feeling annoyed and frustrated by all the obstacles appearing in my path to accepting that I needed to be creative and flexible as I continued through the day. Therefore, I would need to relax and take things more slowly, and most likely I’d have to simply let some things go.

So does any of this sound familiar?  In times of frustration and annoyance when life is throwing one curve ball after another in our direction, it’s easy to throw a fit and stomp our feet and complain that it’s not fair. But it’s much more difficult to have the presence of mind to stop, think about it, and CHOOSE a different path. And it’s not easy to make those adjustments sometimes.  However, I’d almost guarantee that the outcome would be so much better!

If you’re curious about how music therapy might help, contact me anytime.  I’m always happy to answer questions!