My new neighbor, Michael, doesn’t know that on this day he did more than move furniture into my bedroom. His calm demeanor sticks in my head still. Michael is a cabinet maker by trade and rose to the challenge of our compact bedroom, with nary a drawer to be seen. His is next door, you see, and is a duplicate of ours.Plans were made, a lovely cabinet was born, and installation was planned. Ooops… not so fast. I think someone forgot a small detail — how to get it through the door. ha. About 4″ too tall, I’d say, no matter how you wrangled it. And wrangling wasn’t easy. I heard lots of shuffling, murmuring, and speculating at the end of that hall. Then finally, reality. This big thing will not fit through that little thing. Believe me, they tried every which-a-way.
My point. There was no cussing, no foot stomping, no blaming. All I heard was his announcement, “We’ve never had this happen before. I have to cut it.” He’d spent all those hours making this beautiful piece and calmly announced that he had to cut it in half. That must’ve hurt. He and his assistant inched this heavy piece back up the hall, reloaded it into the truck and headed back to the shop drawing board. Amazingly, they were back an hour later with two pieces they would splice together.
See for yourself… magic. Now, I really don’t know Michael very well, maybe his head was exploding and all hell broke loose when he got back to the shop. All I know is what he showed me — a calm and collected reaction to adversity, WITH HUMOR, and it rubbed off big time.
So much stress is avoided by going with the flow, in accepting the change that’s required at the time. Being able to adapt quickly to a “change of plans” is a true gift and very important if we want to live longer, better lives. And I do. I definitely do.