The Education of the Day

Today some­thing will hap­pen that will force you to learn about or deal with an unfa­mil­iar prob­lem. You will not like hav­ing to deal with it. After you have tack­led it and won or lost, you will be a bit more mature because of it. Much of life is like the first day in the weight room. Every­thing is going to feel heavy. Each action will take some delib­er­ate thought. Your temp­ta­tion will be to give up, to com­plain, or to step into cyn­i­cism (a down­ward spi­ral of end­less per­ceived flaws that grow more men­ac­ing with each step).
Per­son­ally, I like tack­ling them first thing in the morn­ing — if I have a choice. I have always been one to face the music. Get it done and get on with the day! But I do not always have that option. Some­times the novel prob­lem comes right in the mid­dle of the day or when I am the most tired. That is where pon­der­ing or med­i­ta­tion can come in handy. I have learned to get my mind around it before I take the first action. Some­times I walk away from it to let the emo­tional and spir­i­tual ener­gies col­lect. If I am too hun­gry, I eat first, then I come back to the prob­lem. I am the top of the food chain (ahead of my car or the phone). The brain should not be dis­tracted by the stom­ach (a prin­ci­ple I learned when I first came to this planet).
Lately I have received a lot of unwanted but nec­es­sary edu­ca­tional lessons about com­puter soft­ware glitches. How can some­thing work so well then take up such huge amounts of my time with no results? Can these inan­i­mate machines actu­ally suf­fer from a sort of demon pos­ses­sion? Can it spread from the cor­rupted soft­ware to my ner­vous sys­tem? To what degree are my machines using me instead of me using them?
It is impor­tant not to per­son­al­ize strug­gles with things — or even peo­ple for that mat­ter. There may be a lot of wis­dom out there, but there is not a man­ual for every­thing that will hap­pen to you or me. The best problem-solving man­u­als are writ­ten on the job. It is impor­tant to face the chal­lenge head-on. Avoid­ance mul­ti­plies the dif­fi­culty. When today is over, we will be some­how be smarter, tougher, and bet­ter pre­pared for the next inevitable “edu­ca­tional” opportunity.