Confucius Say: Life is Really Simple But We Insist on Making it Difficult

This morning The Teenager and I went to the High School at an ungodly hour to attend a meeting of our service club and, my co-sponsor failed to show up. Actually, that's inaccurate; she showed up four minutes before the first bell rang. Had The Teenager hung around, she would have been late for her first class and that didn't sit well with me.

Tomorrow night, we are supposed to host an all-night literacy event for the Middle School kids. I have received no detailed information on the event and, due to the fact that The Teenager and I have to be in Neighboring Town for a volleyball tournament early Saturday morning; will be unable to help for longer than a few hours. I feel bad about that but, had I been involved in the planning, I could have suggested a date that might have worked better for us.

My struggle with this situation obviously boils down to two things: one, my co-sponsor and I have wildly divergent communication skills and, two, we approach event planning in very different ways. I'm not trying to be judgmental here, or, to say that my way is better, but; our club is suffering due to these differences and I'm not sure how much longer it can continue like this. All of which feels like a failure on my part. A huge failure.

Worrying and stressing about this issue has taken up a lot of my personal head space, recently and; I don't like that. This morning, I finally arrived at the conclusion that; if the club goes away, life will still go on. Yeah, the kids will have fewer opportunities to fulfill their community service requirements for graduation and the community in general will lose a great asset but, life will rush in to fill in the blanks; it always does.

And, it won't mean that I have failed; it will simply mean that I needed to take a step back, to regroup and to refocus on ways that I can be of better service. I mean, failure doesn't lie in the attempt, failure lies in the unwillingness to try.

I'm sort of amazed at how much better I feel simply for realizing that fact. Or, for admitting it to myself, anyway.

It's almost as though I am evolving into an adult or something.