Difference a Day
It’s amazing to me how different life can be from day to day, and, along those lines, how absolutely impossible it is to measure the happiness of one’s life (or even the peacefulness or the conflict-free-ness of it) by one morning.
Take this week, for example:
Yesterday, because of a smallish mistake a restaurant made on my order, I and my co-workers ate lunch for free (!). This, I’ll just tell you, was enough to make me grin from ear to ear, while exclaiming how nice this restaurant is! such good customer service! what a wonderful manager! I even wrote a letter to the company’s headquarters, just because I was feeling so positively pleased.
But that was yesterday. Today, a colleague I have come to greatly dislike wrote me a nasty letter, which to me came out of nowhere and was based on presumptions. Trying to take the higher road, I apologized for what he accused me of, saying that wasn’t what I’d meant. I also mentioned, at the end, that using expletives when referring to people I work with (or me) probably wasn’t appropriate. The whole event got me in such a down mood, feeling so frustrated and irritated and wanting to get away from him, the office, anyone who reminds me of the incident in question.
And then, just as I’m high as a kite in my self-pity, I think of that really kind manager yesterday, who bent over backwards to help me and make me happy, at no real reward to himself really. And I remember how on-top-of-the-world everything was afterwards and feel a little embarrassed at how bottom-of-the-barrel I’ve become because of one (mean maybe) person.
What does this all have to do with personal finance? Well, aside from the not-paying-for-a-meal thing yesterday and the hey-I-still-have-a-job thing today, not a lot. Except to say that just because your stock portfolio or your career path or your 401K seem down today doesn’t mean they will tomorrow. And vice versa, I suppose.
I guess what I mean is: most everything’s temporary. And when you see things that way, there’s not a lot to worry about.
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