This morning, my son was faced with a terrible decision. He could deny Mommy privacy in the bathroom, or play with Roomba Rita. At two years old, he isn't much for delayed gratification, so he went to the office, picked up the Roomba and "her" charging station, and brought them into the bathroom to be with me. Had he just wanted to run the vacuum, all would be well -- but he tried to dock her and was getting very upset when she wouldn't do it. His problem: when he picked up the charging station, he detached the power cord. Without power, the Roomba didn't know the charging station wasn't just another toy.
My son's favorite toy is a robotic vacuum from iRobot. How sci-fi is that! Getting back to the point though, he was flipping out because he didn't understand that the power cord was important. Later, when I was swapping out DVD players in an upstairs bedroom, I had trouble getting an image on the screen. What important detail had I missed? The old machine had used one video connection, and the new machine was using another -- I had forgotten to detach the old video cable from the TV when I attached the new one, and the TV was trying to use the old connection. Had I been looking at the connections directly, I wouldn't have missed that -- but it was in a tight spot and I was using a small hand mirror to find my connections. Lately, this sort of thing has been happening a lot - a dail not set, a laptop under a poster, an MP3 player in the gym shoes....
Why am I telling you this? It's all about resiliency. When you try to do something, if it doesn't work the way you expected, stay calm -- it may be a simple but important detail. I believe it was Dune that told us that fear is the mind killer -- well, so is panic and anger. If we can stay calm in the face of life's problems, we will often find that our problem will be solved with the addition, or subtraction, or a cable. Proverbial or otherwise.
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