A More Realistic Perspective
Updated: Feb 11, 2021
Do you ever blow things out of proportion? Like it is the end of the world when something is pretty minimal in actuality.
For Christmas a few years ago we made a craft area for our girls. They came downstairs on Christmas morning to find a cute little table and chairs with every bead and pipe cleaner a girl could dream of topped off with a nice big red bow. Let's just say the little pinterest-worthy craft area didn't stay perfect for very long. Not even 24 hours later, my then two-year-old had taken one of the chairs to reach the paint I had put on the top shelf of their toy closet. I came downstairs to find an entire bottle of red paint squeezed all over the table and our cream colored carpet. What was supposed to be a quaint little spot for us to work on art projects together now looked like the scene of a crime.
Needless to say, I was maybe a little bit upset. I had envisioned these perfect little moments of us making bracelets together and now I was trying to figure out how to get red acrylic paint out of very light colored carpet. It turned out that all I needed was some acetone which being a hair stylist of course I had on hand. A little scrubbing and you never would know now what had happened.
I maybe made a bigger deal out of a little spilled paint than I needed to. I probably said a few things I shouldn't have and made my little two-year-old upset over what she thought was a beautiful paint project. Hind sight is always a little more clear, but in my defense I had no idea the paint would come out easily and not a trace would have been left behind.
When life gives us spilled red paint we can make it a big deal or see it for what it really is. If we have a realistic perspective in the first place, maybe we won't be so upset when the table used for paint projects actually gets paint on it. Rarely in life does anything turn out the exact way we imagine. If we are more realistic in the first place, maybe those end of the world moments will turn into learning lessons that we can even laugh about in the long run.