What’s the point?
That’s the question I have been asking myself a lot lately when things aren’t going as anticipated.
Take a recent ski trip for example. It’s coming to the end of the ski season in Colorado, so my fiance and I planned a trip to the mountains. The goal was to get there early and ski from first to last chair. But that’s not how it went.
We got a late start. We got into a fight the night before (over what I can’t even remember), and it ruined our night and pushed out bedtime back a couple of hours. And we both slept horribly, so we woke up late.
We didn’t get on the road until about 10 am (first chair is 9 am and we live, without traffic, 90 minutes from the mountain). We hit traffic almost immediately, and ended up at a dead stop for 45 minutes. Fortunately after we got moving again it was clear sailing. However, we it wasn’t until around 1 pm that we put in our first run.
To make a bad situation worse, it was spring break, so the mountain was packed, and lift lines were very long. It was 20 - 30 minutes between each run. By last chair at 4 pm we had put in no more than 5 runs. Not a very productive day. Not the day we had planned.
But what was the actual point of our trip? While the original intention was to get in one last full day of skiing before the season ended, wasn’t there another secondary reason that we planned this trip? An underlying reason for everything we do together. That’s what I started asking myself as we sat in traffic after leaving our house.
The point was as much about spending time together doing something fun, as it was about skiing. And once I began to see our day in that light, all of the stress of our fight the night before, the late start, traffic, and busy chair lifts started to roll off. It no longer mattered how much skiing we got in or what time we got to the mountain. What mattered was that we had the day to ourselves. We had the day together.
Perspective is such a powerful thing! It can literally turn what would normally have been a disappointing and stressful day into a great day together, despite none of my previous expectations being met. I think there’s always a view that we can take to make any situation better. It is not always easy to see, but I’ve been trying more and more to find that perspective shifting why. And the more I search for it, the easier it becomes to see.