One of the responsibilities of my new job is to take the “Deposit” to the financial office across campus about once a week. To do this, I have to take the campus bus. I actually like taking the bus. I also like being able to add an extra half hour on to my lunch , and going to “The Ferg,” a kind of “student union” where you can get an iced tea, and even a Whopper Jr. from Burger King—tho lately, with our house-hunting and serious attempts to pay off our credit cards, we’ve been carpooling and brown-bagging, so Burger King is not usually on the menu these days.
Today I took my Deposit envelope and my salad and boiled egg and went out to wait for the bus. I had been very busy all morning, so I hadn’t had a chance to eat anything but a couple of little muffins, and by this time I was HUNGRY!!! So I decided to take out my boiled egg and eat it while I waited for the bus. I took out the egg and began to peel it.
It immediately occurred to me that the way the universe so often works, once I began to peel the egg, the bus would probably show up before I had a chance to eat it. But then I thought…hey! Either I will have the chance to peel and eat the egg before the bus comes, thus relieving my hunger, or the bus will come, I’ll have to get on, and won’t be able to eat my egg right away, but then I’ll get to “The Ferg” that much faster and be able to sit down and eat my salad. Thus relieving my hunger. No matter how I looked at it, I was close to relieving my hunger. It was a win-win situation.
With these thoughts, it also occurred to me that in life there are probably plenty of times when it would be a wise strategy to concoct a “win-win” situation, whenever possible. Some people might call this looking for the cloud’s silver lining. It’s kind of like that, I suppose. My point is that whenever something seems, at first, to be a negative, if you try, you can put on a positive spin by connecting it to another situation, which also appears to be negative. If only one of those negative things CAN happen, then the fact that the other negative thing DOESN’T happen is automatically transformed into a positive.
See? It’s all about attitude.
