Home Again

Pilgrim State Hospital, Long Island, NY, 2009

Back home from vacation, settled back into the routine of work, and I encounter life's all-too-predictable setbacks and triumphs.  As Hamlet said,  there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. 

To be more specific and less cryptic, when I got home Sunday afternoon, I found that the fallen tree next door had indeed damaged my home.  The main tree never hit my house, fortunately, but it knocked branches off that fell on my roof, and when I arrived at my house on Sunday, I saw that rain had finally leaked through the roof, soaking my bed and staining the ceiling. It must have been from the impact of one of those falling branches on my roof.

It's thinking that makes this bad, and I can easily conjure up a calamity scenario and fall into self-pity.  So easy, in fact, that the trick is not to.  It's not that I have to like the hassle and cost of a major household repair, it's just that I've trained myself to accept that this is what is, this is what I have to deal with, and I can choose to either be all upset about it, or just go about fixing, repairing, and taking care of it.  Play the hand I've been dealt.

It's not good, but it's the mind that can make it oh so much worse.