Do you ever feel like things just went sideways and you are not sure what happened? Are you ever doing something you thought would be fun then someone says something, or something happens, and all of a sudden you or people are upset, and it is not so enjoyable anymore?

In these moments I have learned to pause and get curious about what I am thinking. I practice awareness. Practicing awareness, being open and curious, about what is happening and what I am making it mean, with the thoughts I am thinking, helps me to recover more quickly and get back to enjoying the moment.

Recently my husband and I were putting up Christmas lights. I have always loved decorating the trees outside whatever house I live in with lights for Christmas. I have done this since I was in high school. I remember climbing a ladder to decorate a huge evergreen tree outside my childhood home. I’ve always thought any evergreen tree in the landscaping was worthy of being decorated.

We do not have any evergreen trees in our current landscaping so last year I started getting creative trying to decorate other trees in our yard. I wrapped lights around the trunks of a couple trees in our landscaping. I see this done in other places and it looks nice, but I found it time-consuming and annoying actually getting the lights around the trees. There must be some trick I do not know. (I feel this way about several things in life, like I am somehow making it harder than it has to be, but I do not know a better way. Sound familiar?)

This year I decided to try decorating a Japanese maple tree near our mailbox. A house in our neighborhood always decorates the Japanese maple in their yard and it looks so good. I had these net lights that we have had for years, and I thought I could drape them over the tree. Sounds easy enough, right? Dean nicely volunteered to help me with this process. Dean got out the ladder and we got to work. Well, the tree was bigger than I expected and the lights did not go as far as I thought they would.

I started thinking thoughts that caused me to feel bad about Dean having to help and things not going according to my plan. I wanted the lights to be a certain way and felt I struggled to communicate or articulate my expectations well. I felt bad that Dean was the one up on the ladder trying to make the idea in my head that I was not communicating well a reality. I wished I could have just done it myself. I worried that he was upset about having to help. I started thinking he was acting a bit weird. And I started apologizing, saying maybe this was a bad idea and we should just give up. (I tend to overreact when I feel things are not going as planned. My brain goes into overdrive and sometimes my knee-jerk reactions cause more problems. Not sure if anyone else ever has this problem.)

Just this past holiday weekend, I planned too much in a morning’s time. I wanted to be laid back and go with the flow, but I also had a list of all I wanted to get done. Instead of just walking the dog like I normally do, I asked my family, a few days in advance, if they wanted to go play disc golf this particular morning. Then I could be with all of them, and the dog would get a good walk in.

That morning I was up early. I fed the animals. I went to the grocery store for a few things we needed. When I got home, I made bacon and pancakes for breakfast. We left for the disc golf course about 30-45 minutes behind schedule. It took longer than I remembered to get to the course. A few holes in I realized I was not going to be home by the time I had scheduled to start cooking dinner. My sister and her family, and my dad and brother, were all coming for dinner. Then my sister texted and said they would be at our house earlier than they had originally said.

So, suddenly, I felt very behind. I knew it was my thinking that was causing me to feel this way. I worked hard to stay in the moment, enjoy this time with my family, and think beneficial thoughts. I tried telling myself it would all be fine. But I did not really believe me. As my family threw extra discs at seemingly every hole, I was thinking this is just taking more time. When we finally got to the end of the course, people started saying they were hungry. They wanted to pick up food on the way home. I wanted to just go home then they could go get something after. My husband drove us to Chick-fil-A, and the drive thru line was long. Sitting in the backseat of my vehicle between two of my boys, my thoughts were having their own way and I was getting stressed. I was trying to tell myself all would be fine but again I did not believe myself.

I could not believe I was not there to welcome my sister and her family who had come from Texas. And I wondered what did they think of me not being there to welcome them. I could not believe I was off schedule on getting the meat in the oven to cook for dinner so now dinner would be an hour late. I tried telling myself, well my boys were eating Chick-fil-A now so they would not be hungry for a while. I thought everyone else was only thinking about themselves and not me and my schedule. Later my husband would say, “we lost her for a while, but she came back to us.” I was lost in my thinking in that moment and not liking the feelings I was generating.

Once we got home, I welcomed my sister and her family.  My sister nicely volunteered to help me get dinner started and in the oven. I started relaxing because I started thinking beneficial thoughts. I was realizing and believing that it would all be okay however it turned out. I remembered that getting upset about things was not helping anyone. It made me miserable and the people around me miserable. My years of practicing mind management were paying off and I was able to quickly recover from my unhelpful thinking.

It was my thinking that something had gone wrong, that I was off schedule, that things were not turning out the way I had planned, that were causing me to be miserable. My brain was trying to be helpful, but it was offering me my old thoughts, my old ways of being, and I knew that that was no longer what I wanted to live from. I am extremely thankful for the work I have done to retrain my brain, to be onto my brain and the thoughts it offers. I am thankful for the skill I have developed to practice awareness of my thinking and then intentionally choose my thoughts. I am thankful that I can be self-compassionate in my moments when, as my husband says about our dog, I lose the plot.

Dinner was an hour later than I originally planned but no one complained. It all worked out. It all was fine. We had a wonderful weekend with family, eating lots of good food, playing games, and hanging out.

I share all this in hopes of making you feel normal if you too struggle with self-sabotaging thoughts and sometimes lose the plot whether it is while putting up Christmas lights or at an outing with your family. I share in hopes of encouraging you that you too can retrain your brain. You choose what you think. You choose the feelings you generate for yourself with your thoughts. We can intentionally choose the thoughts we allow to ruminate in our brains. Let’s choose to think on what is helpful, beneficial, and excellent.

Keep seeking and discovering! There is a better Way!