Life's Little Surprises

 

Some days life will just throw a curve at you.  You go into the day thinking it will be like any other, just another day of swatting the bat at what comes along…batting practice speed fastballs, take your hacks and make sure your proverbial timing is down…when boom, the ball breaks.  Who throws breaking balls during batting practice and I’m not talking a batting practice breaking ball anyway.  I mean a Christy Matthewson 12-6 curve that falls off the table.  Where did that come from?  (For my baseball purists, yes, I am aware, that the Christian Gentleman threw less of a traditional 12-6 curve than he did a 9-3 screwball, but my point is the same.  You expect something really straight forward and then boom!) 

Day in and day out we have our habits, good and bad, which define us.  Who breaks tradition and gets a McDonalds coffee on Thursday when the rest of the week is Starbucks?  It just doesn’t happen, right?  I know I have my morning routine whether I am headed to work or not.  It seems to infuriate my kids when I am always up at 5AM or thereabouts central time with or without the alarm clock.  What is the likelihood you do too?  

So we live our lives, or pretend to, shuffling along trying to move up a rung of our corporate ladder or team or just stay put, stay in our pajamas and shuffle along watching whatever is on the idiot box until a call.  No, I don’t mean an EMS call per se, but now and then you see things different.  You do something or something is done and it disrupts the plan and then you get to see things fresh.  Whatever it is that breaks up your pond, those ripples allow you to change you pattern long enough to see something different and then it hits you.  There’s more out there than shuffling along.

Sometimes life’s little surprises are completely unplanned for and they happen when you would least expect them.  Sometimes life’s surprises end up changing other plans you had months down the road, but what can you do, but smile and say “thanks God…I needed that.”  Indeed sometimes, we all need a breaking ball in our life to change up our perspective and lend a new set of eyes to who we are, what we are doing, and where we are headed.  It isn’t enough to say we are headed in the right direction.  Now and then you have to look up and make sure and sometimes you need someone to put an obstacle in your path to make sure you are going in the right direction.