When Life Gives You Lemons

And we’re back…..

Well, sort of.

With luck, this blog is now – after 12 days or so – reaching anyone who subscribes to it, whether by RSS feed or by email.

If, however, you try to access it via Google, Chrome or any of the other splendid search engines out there, you are still likely to encounter some sort of warning telling you that if you click on this site your body will burst into flames, your bank account will depleted and a plague of locusts will infest the entire planet. (But hey, go ahead and click. It’s your funeral!)

I once wrote a post entitled Crisis Management: Lessons From France about staying calm during a crisis. (Note: You probably won’t be able to read that post right now. See above). It concerns a trip my family made to France during a train strike a couple of years back. While we basically flipped out as we a. missed our scheduled train b. caught one four hours later and then c. had to sit on our bums in the aisle for the entire two-hour journey, I noticed that all around us, the French were just drinking wine, laughing and completely chilling out.

Granted, French people have way more experience with strike activity than we Americans do. But they just took it all in stride. Fast forward to last week. Sure, I was incredibly frustrated that some alien virus had snuck into my blog and basically destroyed it – over Thanksgiving, no less – which meant that my wonderful web guru was (quite understandably) not on hand for most of the week to help me out. But there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. Radical acceptance, to borrow another phrase from myself.

But I learned something else from that excursion to France which I forced myself to remember several times over the past week. It comes from that old adage: When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

Because it wasn’t only my blog that went pear-shaped last week, as we say over here. I had a job interview that didn’t quite work out. And – oh yes – there was the power outage that nearly prompted a divorce. (Of course, it could have been worse. At least I’m not Herman Cain.) So here’s the lemonade, in reverse order:

a. Exhibit A: Power Outage. Sunday morning. Furiously trying to throw together an apple pie for belated, Expat Thanksgiving Day celebration here in London. Clock is ticking because I meant to do this the night before forgot to defrost butter. Also rushing because of new-found zeal for Zumba and I wanted to squeeze in class at 11 while pie was in oven. Then entire endeavor grounds to a halt as computers, lights, stove, heating and hot water all shut off abruptly. Takes approximately 90 minutes to diagnose problem, at least half of which is consumed by furious bickering with husband over assorted switches, circuits and general mayhem that ensues.

Silver lining?: He eventually diagnoses problem, which appears to reside with short circuit in washer/dryer, and rest of house resumes activity. Realize that I could never have done this on my own and feel instantly grateful for the division of labor within our marriage, and all resentment lifts.

b. Exhibit B: Job interview with fabulous organisation in London that appears to be a great fit with both my interests and skill set. Go in to do an eight-hour trial “work day” to see if it’s a good fit. It isn’t, but mostly because the position that’s open isn’t what I’m after at this point in my career. Feel really dejected afterwards as for a brief moment, I thought I had this whole job thing all sewn up. And now I’m back to the drawing board.

Silver lining?  I have a much stronger sense of what I want – and don’t want – from my professional life right now. I’d never have known that with as much certainty if I hadn’t have gone in and tried this on.

c. Exhibit C: The Blog. Was absolutely devastated not to be blogging as there were – as always – so many things I wanted to share with this community.

Silver lining? I really missed blogging. And that was perhaps the best lemonade of all.

Image: Lemon by Chugy via Flickr under a Creative Commons License.