proteanme

All the time. Last week I had a flat tire on my bike on Wednesday and then my chain broke on my ride home Thursday night. A week before that I stepped on a pair of my reading glasses and lost my bike gloves. This week I upgraded WordPress and kept getting a 500 Internal Server error that blocked me from accessing any of the admin tools, like the posting tool. Obviously it got fixed but it was frustrating. I keep losing my favorite bandannas, the ones that are already broken in. I didn’t get my New Yorker last week. And every time it rains I feel like my $170 rain jacket should be doing a better job of keeping out the water. No real big deals here, even with the bike break downs, I was close to a bike shop and the mechanics weren’t busy.

Daniel Gilbert, this psychologist who writes and does research about happiness has observed that people “overestimate how future successes and failures will affect their happiness, for the better or worse.” In this article of his I read in the New York Times magazine he said talked about how we have all this fear that we won’t be able to handle the big blows in life and dismiss how much the little every day things accumulate and drive us kind of nuts, like a tear in a screen door that you that you catch you shirt on every day. One of the things I took away from that was one to have some faith in my resilience and two, and two, that I’d be happier if I fixed the tears.