How 2018 is coming to a close
For starters, I have a cold and am not in the mood for much. I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions, but I do so love beginnings and endings, and an annual event provides such an opportunity to reflect and reevaluate yourself and your life. Getting in the mood to celebrate and to cook is another thing.
Last night as I traipsed to bed, all I wanted was to finish a book I’d started and get some actual sleep through my illness. I carried my book, a water bottle, and the remnants of some warm homemade eggnog to my bedside table, then proceeded about my evening routine.
I shuffled through the medicine cabinet, looking for all my nightly meds, plus something that might help me breathe for roughly 8 hours. I felt pretty miserable from lack of oxygen flow and a day I felt was spent in vain. The highlight had been a man in a mermaid shirt at church, but at least I’d laughed a little.
As I stumbled back to bed, teeth already gripping my pills, I reached for the water bottle. A sudden, sharp sting jabbed into my thumb, and I dropped the water bottle in shock. More like pitched it at the bed, to be honest.
A single-word expletive escaped my clenched teeth as I tried to both scream and hold onto my foul-tasting pills at the same time. It started with an F.
“What the absolute eff?!” came next and I realized that not only had I thrown the bottle onto the bed, but that I, myself, was now half-way across the room and that my poor, bewildered husband was staring at me. After a few seconds, squeezing my nails into my left thumbprint, I was able to explain.
“Apparently there was a wasp on my water bottle and it stung my thumb. It is now waiting on the side of the bed for you to go kill it.”
“You know wasps are attracted to water and need it to live?” he asked, as if it were an obvious daily threat I should have expected.
After the execution had been done and the pills swallowed, he continued to stare at me. “How do these things always happen to you?”
I shook my head, perplexed. In the two minutes it had taken me to brush my teeth and retrieve pills, when I was already sick and miserable, a wasp had found its way into the house and onto the lid of my water, where I was about to return. How, indeed.
I do suffer from a run of bad luck. Not tragic, mind you, but just enough to be frustratingly ironic. My mind quickly ran through all the other household members and how they would have reacted, and I started to laugh. It started as a chuckle, but soon both of us were laughing hilariously.
No one else in my family would have laughed. It would have been marked down and remembered forever as a ruined day. The fact that I was laughing at my rotten luck seemed to make it all the funnier to him as a witness.
As I climbed into bed, I reminded myself that laughter is always a choice that we can make. My ability to laugh in the face of adversity is what shows my family that it is possible. Maybe it isn’t such bad luck. Maybe it is my opportunity to show the world that life is entirely what you make of it, so you should make the most you can.
Choose laughter, my friends.