Getting a Grip

By Amy Coward

Someone slap me, please. I’ve had one of those weeks where all I’ve done is whine and I need to get a grip.

Why is it that sometimes you just slip into a funk and focus on every little insignificant thing? I’ve been grumbling that my house renovations aren’t complete. (But I have a roof over my head and a house that’s nearly paid for.) I’ve been complaining that I don’t have the right shoes for an upcoming event. (But I have 50+ pairs in my closet.) I’ve been grousing about not being thin enough. (But I’m one of the healthiest people I know.) Why? Why? Why do I focus on things that don’t matter? I think I have “First World Problem” disease.

I need to take another trip to a third world country to remind me of what life is like elsewhere. Just two years ago, my family and I were traveling to Cambodia and though I knew people lived like they do in that part of the world, I had never seen it. They drink bottled water because their water supply is impure. They have no trash pick-up so the roadsides are full of it. Their windows have no screens and mosquitoes threaten with malaria. Their children are lucky if they get to go to school.

I, on the other hand, wake up in my air-conditioned house, take a hot shower, choose breakfast from a kitchen full of food, drive to work in my own air-conditioned car and go to work in a comfy air-conditioned office.

Yes, I need another trip to get my head on straight.

There are more important things than fancy houses, glamorous shoes and thin bodies. I need to redirect my focus and appreciate all that I have. After all, I only have it because I was lucky to be born in America to a wonderful family. I was given a good education, good health care and lots of other things I don’t really deserve. It was just luck, folks. I could have been born anywhere and things would have been drastically different.

Tomorrow is a new day, as they say, and I am pledging to change the channel, reboot, and reset my thoughts. Or at least try. Maybe I’ll even start that gratitude journal I’ve been contemplating. At the very least, I’m going to say a prayer of thanks for all I have.

How long will this positive attitude last? I don’t know. Maybe a week. I’m pretty sure in no time at all I’ll begin to whine again.

But when I plan my next trip to Cambodia or somewhere similar, I hope I’ll have more to think about than what shoes to take.

Amy Coward is a public relations professional in Columbia, SC. When she is not managing the madness of event planning at Palmetto Health Foundation, she is turning her empty nest upside down looking for fun and finding it. 

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