Clouds

I might be 64 but I certainly don’t feel like an old man. However, I have noticed that I’m a bit more forgetful than I used to be. Sometimes I misplace things like my keys or my phone and it can be really frustrating. On Memorial Weekend I lost something extremely valuable and it upset the heck out of me. But looking back on it now, I’m not sure it was necessarily age related.

My wife and I decided to stay in town over Memorial Weekend and work on fixing up our patio. She challenged me to create a decorative hardwood wall to hide the ugly old fence on the north side of the patio. I love wood working anyway, so I gladly accepted the challenge. After figuring out the type of wood I wanted to use and how many boards I needed, I jumped into my truck and headed to the nearest Home Depot. Unfortunately, that Home Depot only had 6 boards in stock. Two hours and four Home Depot stops later, I finally had enough wood. I was really frustrated by then because I had a lot of other things I needed to do and there just never seems to be enough time in the day.

Since we don’t have a garage at our Beach House, I do my woodworking in the carport area. After backing into the carport, I grabbed my wallet, phone, and keys and dropped the tailgate of my truck. I headed into the house to let my wife know I was home and then rushed back out to the carport to uncover my electric saw and get to work. Around 6pm that evening I was only a third of the way done, but I was tired so I decided to knock off for the day. There was still a large amount of wood in the back of my truck, so I left it there and went back inside the house. After cleaning up and changing clothes, I noticed that my keys and watch were on my dresser… but my wallet was gone!

I figured I must have left it in my truck, so I didn’t panic. After carefully searching every square inch inside my truck, I still couldn’t find it. Maybe I set it down inside the house somewhere, but after searching everywhere inside our small house (which doesn’t take long), I still couldn’t find it. Now it was time to panic! I must have accidentally dropped it somewhere. What an idiot I am! I had to start calling to cancel all my credit cards and now I was both angry and frustrated.

The next day I continued to work on the hardwood wall and was able to complete it. It actually turned out pretty nice, which took away some of my anger and frustration from the previous day. In fact, I was feeling really good inside for the first time all weekend, and I think it comes from being able to create something beautiful from scratch. As the sun was setting, I went back out to the carport one last time to put away my tools and close the tailgate of my truck. When I did, guess what I found sitting on my rear bumper!

And that got me thinking… Being angry and frustrated often clouds my mind and makes every problem seem worse than it really is. Happiness on the other hand brings me many rewards!

Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

 ~ Abraham Lincoln