What Fresh Blessing is This?
“What fresh hell blessing is this? “
Picture me sitting at my kitchen table at four-freaking-thirty in the morning. It's dark outside and below freezing. I've got one dog in a cone of shame (oh, all right, we switched the cone out for an inflatable doughnut thing, but still!) and another one that wants to play 24-7. They can't, of course, be allowed to play with each other, because the reason for the doughnut-of-shame is a laceration and stitches that need to heal.
This means letting them out in the yard separately, not together. And letting the doughnut-afflicted dog out means me going out WITH her, because otherwise she will just stand by the fence and look mournful and, well, afflicted. Which means me putting on boots and jacket and going out with her so she'll get on with doing whatever she needs to do. And then letting Fitz out separately.
Both dogs are bored. If you have dogs, you know that bored & restless in the house does not make for good focus time.
And me? I'm trying to write my new book, and set up launch things for Party Planning Can Be Murder and do Author Genie client work and all the other things… and meanwhile political upheaval and wildfires and disasters everywhere…
And so, the words I was poised to write in my morning journal were exactly what I was feeling:
What fresh hell is this?
Writing them was going to take me further down the victim rabbit hole. Which was NOT going to make for a good day. Because if I present that question to my brain - it's going to very effectively come up with a whole laundry list of fresh hells for me to suffer in.
So instead, I chose to reframe and invited in a new question: What fresh BLESSING is this?
And you know what? Magic happened.
Really.
I've practiced the art of the reframe for many years now, but something about that particular question made it the best and most magical reframe of my life. My brain pricked up its little ears and began presenting me with blessings. A gazillion of them, large and small. All day long, they just kept on coming.
So this is my new mantra, and I've been writing it in my journal a lot of late. I talked about it in the latest episode of the ONE HAPPY THING PODCAST I co-host with Jennifer Moorman and Maddie Dawson, if you'd like to take a listen. (It's a super short episode, just over ten minutes).
I challenge you to give this reframe a try. Write the words down on a sticky note or your planner or in a journal. WHAT FRESH BLESSING IS THIS? And see what happens.
If you try it - I'd love it if you’d drop a comment and tell me about your fresh blessings!