Making Lemonade

As I write this, I'm an hour away from a doctor's appointment that will, I'm fairly sure, confirm that I woke up this morning with pink eye.  Now, this was not something I asked for, encouraged, or ever dreamed would happen to me, today of all days, but nonetheless, there it is.

I had grand plans for today.  For starters, I was going to go in to school to teach, and after school was going to teach some piano lessons.  That's out the window.

I had a couple of errands I was going to run at other times throughout the day.  Yep, those are shot, too.

What I've got is an eye that itches and goes blurry from time to time, and the inability to go pretty much anywhere in public because most folks don't want what I've got. 

To me, this seems the perfect case of life giving me lemons.  I wanted a nice piece of chocolate, I got a fat pile o' sour lemons; I wanted to go teach and run my errands, I've got to stay home. 

All too often, we take these setbacks and allow them not just to set us back, but to totally derail us, throw us off our path, hurl us to the ground.  They don't need to do so.  We can take those lemons and make some lemonade ... but we've got to bring our own proverbial sugar.

Yes, I can't go anywhere, but I can use this extra time to get caught up on some things here at home.  I can sit at my computer and send some much-needed correspondence.  I can proof some scores that I've needed to look over for a while.  I can even compose a little bit, all the while resting, drinking plenty of fluids, and stopping to nurse and baby my eye when and as it needs it. 

The strange thing about "life lemons," though ... even though they may feel like they totally knock us for a loop, they're often exactly what we need to stay on track, if only we'll look at it.  Yes, I would very much have liked to go to school today, but having this extra time at home will let me get done several things that, quite frankly, I had no clue when I was going to find the time to do them.  I've been staring at my white board here in my office and shaking my head at all I have to do with pretty much no time to get it done ... and now life has given me the means to do it (though I would have loved if it could have done it in a more pleasant and less disgusting way). 

What it all boils down to -- in life, in creativity, everywhere -- is that our circumstances don't define us; we define our circumstances.  I can look at a case of pink eye as either a problem and inconvenience, or an opportunity.  The same goes for any other situation in which I find myself. 

The next time you have something go horribly awry in your life, ask yourself if you're going to make it something that ruins your day, or an opportunity just waiting to be seized.