You and I both lead busy lives with frequently over scheduled days. The litany for many is: I never got around to that,orI just haven’t had a minute! So whenan appointment is cancelled, a meeting is postponed or an unforeseen event shifts your scheduleit can leave you disappointed, even angry. Time is precious, you set some aside for that specific purpose, that person, and now there’s a delay in a getting that contract signed, meeting someone you really wanted to see. The cancellation could make you feel like a failure: put down and dismissed.
Or maybe… It’s a gift!
Normally I work with my trainer at the gym in the late afternoon, but since I have an afternoon flight today, my wonderful trainer, Latina, offered to train me early in the morning. Great! I thought, although it didn’t seem quite so appealing when I had to get up in the dark this morning and put on my workout clothes.
I was awake, dressed and drinking my protein smoothie when the phone rang. Latina was on the Interstate, there’d been a breakdown and traffic wasn’t moving. “Call me be back when it is,” I told her, and then I usedthe time to pack. But fifteen minutes later she called to say she hadn’t moved at all. We would need to cancel.
My first thought was: What a pain, especially since I’m all ready to workout.
My second thought was: What a gift!
Now I had 90 minutes of FOUND time. Ninety precious minutes. I could do anything at all I wanted to …
This is the moment of reckoning when someone cancels. If we fail to recognize we’ve been given a gift, it’s tempting to fall into a funk about the wasted time, unnecessary preparation, missed opportunity, and we might waste our gift fooling around on Facebook, playing online solitaire or engaging in some other mind-numbing activity.
But if you see that 90 minutes as a gift, you can read the article you’ve been meaning to read, call your elderly aunt, take a walk around the block. This could be just the right moment to focus on the tasks you have been putting off! And get ahead of the project you’ve been dreading.
I usually try to start on something that’s not due right away. Something that may be on my schedule for later in the day, later in the week, or even a long-term goal I’ve been putting off. When I do that, it’s like I’m pulling something off! Doing something ahead of schedule means I’ll have another gift of more free time later in the week.
So, when Latina cancelled, I decided to write the blog. Not the one I had planned, but this one. And I’ll still have time to get on the treadmill and return some critical emails. I could have chosen to clean off my desk, but if you read last week’s blog, you know I left it clean last night.
Of course there are all those files on the side of the desk. Hmm… that may be what I do with I my next cancellation – which is really a gift, isn’t it?
Remember to share what YOU do when you find time on yourhands…
Until next Tuesday. YIPPEE!
Elizabeth
Of course, you could have gone to the gym and worked out by yourself. Just sayin’. 🙂
Thanks Aileen for writing. I worked out at home and that works too.
e