This morning my hunger pains woke me up at 6.30am (having a bag of popcorn and a beer for dinner turned out to be a bad idea!) Anyhow, hungry I got up determined to get my favorite sourdough pancakes. Our usual brunch spot in the city makes amazing sourdough pancakes and so tired and cranky I made everyone get ready in a hurry, jumped in a car and drove with anticipation to my sourdough pancakes… Only to be told by the waitress that they were out of dough for the day. Seriously?!?! There I was, sulking a little child because the very thing I wanted was not available and worse, refusing to try anything else on the menu.
Big deal one may think - they are only pancakes, hardly a matter of life or death. Well, that may be true, but it made me realize how common that behavior is to our everyday life. From insignificant to major instances, we idealize things so much setting some unrealistic standards(jobs, relationships ourselves for example) that when we don't get what we expected we sulk and complain and refuse to consider any other alternative.
How many times we have thrown away a good opportunity because we were too stuck on what we thought was good for us and reluctant (or scared) to try something else?
I alway tell my kids how imperative it is to try new things and thereI was this morning refusing to eat anything else but sourdough pancakes. Crazy yes I know.
Dont take me wrong, in life, there is nothing wrong in being specific or clear about what we want, at the end of the day we are given what we ask, or to be more precise what we focus on. What I am saying is that if we are too stubborn to be more open to possibilities, we may miss what we are actually given. We may not realize until it’s too that what was there was exactly what we asked for, we were just to blind (or stubborn) to see it.
So next time the opportunity presents itself to try or do something new, something that has the potential to actually be good for you, do yourself a favor: go for it!
Change leads to opportunities, repetition leads to stagnation and limitation.