When I was somewhere in the region of age 7, my family went on holiday to Florida.
On one of those days, my mom and I went on a walk and came across a true clothing entrepreneur. He was amongst the first of his kind, strutting down the street with his trousers down by his knees, held up only by a hand on the belt buckle.
We could not stop laughing, imagining what his predicament would be were he to need the use of his hands. BYE BYE PANTS! He was bringing booty back, for sure.
Last night, I unpacked my rolley basket with my promotional materials from the trunk of my car and began to make my merry way into a college fair in Temple, Texas (in the rain, mind you), suddenly, the basket I had so much faith in pulled open, leaving all of my set-up magazines, pamphlets, pens, etc on the asphalt.
My day had been pretty absurd, so at this point, I wasn't even upset, I just burst out laughing. Luckily the rep from Abilene Christian gave me a hand and I loaded as much as I could into my tablecloth and carried it like a knapsack into the fair. I can't claim that it was my classiest moment, but I did feel very hick Arkansan. Another load and Abilene and I got it all inside.
I put a lot of faith in that basket. I put a lot of weight in that basket. I had to. There wasn't a way for me to carry all of it, not even with a tablecloth knapsack. But, fair after fair, I was able to rough-it, really only struggling when I had to lift it in and out of the car or up stairs.
When my basket failed me, though, in the least convenient time, my puny muscles and lack of a zillion arms failed me as well, and I couldn't act in excellence. I needed help. I needed my "competitor's" help.
Sometimes, in life, the bottom of our baskets fall out, and all our crap that we've been "successfully" lugging around with us spurts all over the parking lot in the rain and we've got to either accept help or accept that parts of our crap are going to get ruined.
More than that, even when we accept help, the reality is, the process of getting ourselves set back up is going to be messy and a bunch of "put together" people are going to see us struggle. Some may laugh, some may look at us pitifully, and some (those gems) will tell us, "Oh dude. The same thing happened to me a couple months ago...[insert totally humiliating story here that makes you forget that you've got mud on your ankles]."
All of that is better than having a meltdown in the parking lot and never making it inside at all. And yet, so many of us choose the rain.
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