Uh-oh moments

I’ve had a few moments lately. You know the kind. You hit the send button on a key email and the note you wanted to go to two people goes to twenty. You scramble to recall the note, to pull it back, but you come up with nothing but thin air. It’s too late the note has already been delivered and opened.

Your heart sinks faster than one of the deck chairs on the Titanic to the icy bottom of the North Atlantic. You throw your hands up in frustration and fall back in your chair. We all have these types of uh-oh or “oh shit” moments.

They come in all shapes and sizes: you back up your car in the grocery store parking lot and hear the horrible crunch of metal-on-metal; in slow motion you see a half-full wine glass first tip over the coffee table and then onto your spiffy new carpet; you pull your favorite shirt out of the laundry and see smack dab in the middle a stain the size of a quarter that just won’t go away.

Like I wrote, an “oh @#$%&!” moment.

As a kid, I went through two years where I felt like I kept running every few weeks into a series of “oh @#$%&!” moments. I broke five different windows in our house and school over that span. My parents were besides themselves. Every time they looked up I had thrown a ball or put my hand through another window. I didn’t try to break them, I didn’t mean to break them. I wasn’t an awful, terrible kid. They just happened.

I had the same feeling of frustration and cringing each time I broke a new window: Oh @#$%&!

I learned in the end that bad things happen to good people. You can’t stop it. You can’t control everything. You control what you can and move on. You work hard and put your best foot forward. I learned that life usually gives you three endings: Sometimes you swing and miss, sometimes you hit a single up the middle, and then sometimes you hit the ball out of the park.

In the end, you do the best you can.