Lately I’ve been noticing an interesting turn of events, that has made me a bit more comfortable with disappointments and setbacks.
No, I don’t think I’ll be going out of my way to look for problems, but when they do arise, I really can see myself being much cooler, calmer, and even (gasp!) looking forward with a bit of excitement even, to what will happen next.
“Why this weird and unusual behaviour?” you might ask. After all – no one looks forward to disappointments.
Well, it’s a bit uncanny, but over the past several days, I have had several disappointments and setbacks; and observing them all, I have noticed that somehow, something good has come out of them.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a detour as “a deviation from a direct course or the usual procedure; especially: a roundabout way temporarily replacing part of a route.”
No one likes a detour. No one likes situations to come up that takes them off course from the path they began taking or were intending to take. Whether it’s a schedule that’s put off, a mistake you’ve made, a failed attempt at something, being let down by a friend…the list of possible detours and disappointments is endless.
Yet for the past few weeks, these very detours have led me to: be in just the right place at the right time; learn valuable information I previously had not known; find something I’d been wanting but did not know how to get it; be forced to try something I was afraid of and got awesome results; and be forced to choose an alternative method which turned out to be better than the previous one I’d planned.
So, I’m not telling you to go looking for disappointments, but the next time you come up against a detour in your plans, take a step back, remain calm, smile a little, and look out of that positive outcome.
Originally published at atouchofhappy.net