Central Valley Moms

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Good news is… unusual

FACT: Bad news happens in threes. Everybody knows this. Someone dies, two more people are supposed to die. You lose your job, you can pretty much bet you’re going to need car repairs and your favorite pet will have run away.

We who thrive in this superstitious vein have simply come to accept this Rule of Threes as fact; or, to quote the sheep from the movie Babe, “The way things are is the way things are.”

OTHER FACT: Good news is shocking. Wonderful, exciting, glorious—but nonetheless shocking, even if and perhaps especially if you have been preparing for it. Good news happens in blips and burps along life’s road. It crops up, surprising you like a shiny nugget of joy.

OTHER-OTHER FACT: Everything else—if they are not bad things and happening in threes, nor wonderful and exciting and glorious—should be appreciated as much as possible and accepted at face value… because to otherwise not accept the bland, regular, normal parts of life is akin to waggling said blandness in fate’s fat, gaping maw and declaring it under-appreciated.  And heaven for-gawd’s-sake-bid you do not sufficiently appreciate the little things in life. Because, my friends, those things that are *not* appreciated can quickly sour. Like at supersonic speed. And by ignoring the preciousness of the average, you are basically tempting fate into retooling the mundane moments of your life into something HORRENDOUS.

Like many, I’ve dealt with my share of yuckiness spawned by bad news. I’m pretty sure that’s the definition of wisdom: Learning to deal with life’s crap. Sometimes gracefully.

And in these last 40 years, I have also learned that when things go swimmingly, fantastically, super-duperously, what I all-too-quickly presume is a really cute handbag falling from the sky is actually a shoe. And oftentimes—BUT NOT ALWAYS—its match appears out of nowhere and drops right on my head.

This other-shoe occurrence has happened so, so many times in my world that I sometimes ignore the handbag and wait for the other shoe. Good news in my world has been reduced to a dropping shoe named Godot. It could happen. It might happen. Maybe today—but if not today, then surely tomorrow.

Do you see the circle I’ve created here? Do you see how, by not accepting the good at face value, I am tempting fate to deliver me an ugly anvil-of-a-shoe? How, by not appreciating the good and reveling in it, I’m missing out on life’s best handbag experiences?

No more.

I’m going to try something new.

We bought a house—our dream house. We made an offer and the offer was accepted and now we’re in escrow. Life is moving forward. I can accept this. It’s okay to be happy about this. Right? I mean, this bit of news is good, and no matter how many times I pester our infinitely patient and awesome broker, Jeff Carroll (Realty Concepts, LTD.), thinking he will state otherwise, it is for reals. And trues. We really are buying a house.

So for right here, right now, today—this moment—I can revel in this amazingly awesome handbag.

Wow. Just… wow.

Posted by Traci Arbios on Jul 26th, 2010 and filed under Featured Bloggers, Promote. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response by filling following comment form or trackback to this entry from your site