by Margaret Steel Farrell

Well I’m not exactly sure how this came about but, at some point last Wednesday, I threw myself a little pity party. Not too big, no anger or tears. Just a little feeling-sorry-for-myself shin-dig where my ego was the guest of honour. It all started when I thought about giving my one friend a call to meet for coffee. Then, for some reason, I began thinking, “You know what? I’m the one who always calls to ask if she’d like to meet for coffee.” I thought, “It would be nice for a change if she’d give me a call and ask me to go for coffee.” And that’s how it all began . . .

Now, for the record, I wasn’t put out all that much. The truth is, I know we’re very good friends and I know there’s nothing amiss between us right now. It was just this little annoyed feeling that had seated itself in my mind. I began to think – and that’s where I made my mistake – that it would feel good knowing that she thought about me once in awhile and wanted my company enough to call me up and ask me to join her for coffee. Yes, you can imagine where this is going. The next thing I’m doing is thinking about all the times I’ve invited her out to a movie or invited her over to my house or myself over to her house and, before I knew it, our relationship was looking pretty lopsided in the “effort put into it” department and I decided not to give her a call. I wasn’t thinking anything drastic like, “I’ll show her!” No, it was much more subtle than that. I just thought, “If I don’t call her, I wonder how long it will take before she notices we haven’t spent any time together and misses me and gives me a call.” And then I decided that one “culprit” in my life wasn’t enough and I thought about my other relationships and began to look for all the times and ways all the other people I love (and who love me, by the way) have left it up to me to maintain the contact in our relationships. And, with that, the “party” was in full swing.

Now who knows why I started down this path. Some of it definitely had to do with hormones. I was on the swing shift somewhere between paranoid and pissed off. I also may have been a little tired. And, truthfully, it may have been awhile since the last time she’d asked me to go for coffee. But, really, that’s not the point because she shows me how much she cares for me in many other ways all the time. No, I just caved in to a mild case of self-pity.

So here’s where reality kicked in. The VERY NEXT DAY, out of the blue, a friend of mine who lives two provinces away called me at work, “With absolutely nothing on my mind but to say hi.” That is precisely what he said. I kid you not. It was wonderful! I was thrilled and we enjoyed a fun conversation that I had to cut short because I was at work. When I hung up, I thought how cool it was that the universe had suddenly responded to my woes from the day before. And I thought, it’s nice that at least one friend reaches out a lot, perhaps even more than me to him, truth be told. Yes, as you can clearly see, the party was obviously still going strong in the background.

The next day was Friday and, at the end of the day, I began looking forward to the weekend and the plans I had for Saturday night. A whole bunch of us were going to a sold-out dinner/dance which I had only been able to get a ticket for at the last minute because . . . and that’s when I stopped dead in my tracks and the “pity party” came to screeching halt. I had just gotten a ticket to this event four days earlier because my friend – you remember her, the one who never invites me for coffee – gave me a call the moment she heard that someone had an extra ticket and asked if I wanted to go. Oh yeah, and she also invited me to a pre-dance party that one of her friends was throwing. Uh huh. I couldn’t believe it. What the heck had I been thinking?? How had I missed that when both situations had happened within a couple of days of one another?

Well, the answer’s not rocket science. I had missed it because I was so focused on my “misery” that I had no recollection of my good fortune. It was quite the revelation and it really got me thinking. How many times had I allowed myself to focus so long on only one side of an issue that I had completely ignored the very real other side. And then I remembered a story I had read as a child, many, many years ago.

It went something like this. A little girl is visiting at her Grandmother’s house. She looks out a window at the back of the house and is startled to see a dead bird laying in the yard. The grim sight upsets her and she begins to cry. Her Grandmother, seeing what has happened, takes the little girl by the hand and leads her to the front of the house. There, they stand by a window overlooking her large garden, rich with blooms and fluttering butterflies. After a moment, the girl smiles and the Grandmother says kindly, “You see, my dear, you were just looking out the wrong window.”

Now, before you get the wrong idea, I’m not suggesting that the key to life is simply looking the other way. No, trust me, that’s not the message I take from that story at all. Rather, the message I take is that there is bad in this world but there is also good. Things go wrong and people mistreat us. It happens. And, on a grander, less ego-centric scale, there is a lot of pain and suffering in this world. And it needs our attention, for us to stand up and say or do something to make a change. So we do it. But we don’t need to dwell on the bad and see only that. We see it and deal with it and then we can choose to also see the good.

Because, you see, what I realized was that as long as I’m focused on all the ways I’m being wronged by people, I may completely forget all the good things that are happening. And they may be with the exact same people! And there is good, there is always good. I think that, sometimes, when we focus on the bad, after awhile, that’s all we can see. And that’s not only lopsided but it’s not reality. The truth is, we can choose to look out the other window too.

So all of this is to say that, when we find ourselves getting peeved and going down that path that only gets narrower and narrower, maybe that’s a good time to take a step back and get a wider perspective. Because maybe things aren’t as one-sided as we think . . . maybe it’s our thinking that’s one-sided.

Filed under: Margaret's Musings