Close your eyes. Evaluate your perspective on your life. Imagine yourself getting caught in the rain. What about being stuck in traffic when you absolutely have to make it to that appointment on time. What is your perspective? As I was walking the halls of my job, I came across a poster with the following message: The glass is filled with ½ air and ½ water. So technically, the glass is always full.
This struck me as quite an interesting concept because I have always lived my life in black and white, right and wrong. I am learning through this journey of discovering my confidence and strength in my own choices, however, that trying to categorize life into only two sides, two colors, is not possible. Life is a million shades of color because life is all about perspective.
You Are In Control Of Your Perspective
Perspective is based on choice. Isn’t that so ironically annoyingly simple? It is your choice to look at your life as being full of happiness and joy or sadness and anger. What do you regularly choose? How do you perceive your actions and reactions to life?
If you have been keeping up on my blogs then you know I have spent my life living in a constant cycle of “what if”. What if school gets cancelled. What if I get cancer. What if this boy breaks up with me. What if I take this big leap in life and fail. An endless diatribe of useless thoughts and wasted energy.
Believing that I could have control over life, which by its very nature is uncontrollable, gave me a false sense of belief that I somehow would be able to avoid any negative things happening to me. It was a simple equation: constant worry + control = my pathetic universe. I had no perspective.
My Sad Bubble
I lived in my little bubble trying to control everything and everyone around me. I lacked an understanding of how much bigger this world was and how small I really am. This sustained me for the majority of my life. On occasion, when something negative happened, I found a viable reason, explained it away in my mind. Case in point, when I was pregnant with my daughter.
Despite all of my planning and plotting before and during the pregnancy, I still had to have an emergency cesarean section. This was quite a disappointment for me because I thought I had this pregnancy mapped out from its very inception. I’ll explain just how deeply my crazy ran.
In order to keep my employer happy I wanted to have my daughter somewhere in the warmer months. I am a woman of science. I calculated the month I would need to get pregnant for the timeline to work and patiently waited for it to arrive. Without going into too much of an awkward biology lesson, I was charting my fertility and knew the exact date that M1 and I had to “do the deed” in order to become pregnant.
The Best Laid Plans
Finally, those two long weeks were over and I could take a test to see if I was pregnant. Secretly I already knew I was. I planned everything down to the last detail so it should have worked, right? As I had predicted the test was positive and so began the process of having a baby. I worked with my doctor to do what I needed to and knew the exact date that my baby was due.
That day came and went. And so did the next and the next. When I called my doctor she suggested that I come in for a quick check up. My fluid levels were dangerously low. Labor was going to have to happen now. I was fine with that because I had already told myself my uterus must have been too comfortable – the baby wasn’t ready to give up its prime real estate!
When labor began I waited for my body to respond to the induction drugs, and waited and waited. My doctor has a soft voice and was eternally positive. Too many hours had passed though and she gently suggested that M1 and I begin to discuss the possibility of a cesarean section. At this point it was one in the morning and I had been awake for over 24 hours and in pain for about half of that.
The fact that my body wasn’t able to complete the process was not acceptable and as the doctor was slicing my abdomen open I was yelling over the curtain, “Tell me the reason! What’s the reason that I can’t do this on my own!”
Failed Perspective
As the first cries of my daughter rang through the operating room the doctor shouted back, “She is asynclitic! Your baby’s head is tilted in the birth canal and got stuck!” Wouldn’t you know, it wasn’t the cries of my new baby girl that put a smile on my face right before I passed out. It was the knowledge that there was a scientific reason for the labor to not happen naturally.
Please don’t get me wrong, typing this admission makes me cringe. What kind of a mother does that make me? I’ll tell you. It makes me a real one. I lacked perspective in that situation. I was not looking at the bigger picture, the welcoming of a new life into this world – looking at what I had accomplished. I was focusing on the so called failure. A failure that was seen as such only through my warped perspective.
So do you have a glass half empty or glass half full perspective? Can you throw out that method of thinking and look at the glass as always being full? Try and recognize over the next week when you are losing your perspective and bring it back. Use the comment section below and put a thumbs up or thumbs down if you are up for this challenge and look at the glass as always full!
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