Take the Long Way Home: A Lesson on Slowing Down When Life Throws You a Curveball
The other night, I cried over pizza. Let me explain…
I had this fun idea to order takeout pizza and then take the kiddos to a local farm that serves ice cream to eat it outside (and look at the farm animals).
It was my picture “perfect” plan, until a wrench got thrown in it.
As we head out the door to cram it all in before the race to kid’s bedtime (IYKYK), we hit a road block when a traffic jam turned our six-minute ride into a 20-minute detour through back roads.
When we finally arrived to pick up the pizza 30 minutes late, mine wasn’t even started yet. It would be another 15 minute wait.
So we drove to the farm to kill time…without our pizza. As I looked at the empty picnic tables where we could have been enjoying our family dinner, I could feel my energy start to shift. I was was fuming.
Now it was getting past little guys bedtime, we still hadn’t eaten and my perfect plan was “ruined.” Frustrated, I ran inside to order a quart of ice cream to go instead, and back to the pizza place we went.
On our drive home, I could feel myself getting annoyed as I replayed the chain of events and I started to cry. “I just wanted to have a fun little night with our family and it was ruined.” In the moment I knew I was overreacting, but the tears were flowing. I couldn’t help it.
It wasn’t until we were back home and I was nursing little guy before bed that I realized the lesson in all of this — the universe was screaming at me to SLOW DOWN. To enjoy the moment. To go with the flow. To “take the long way home.”
And in the midst of my pity party, I missed appreciating how happy our little girl was hanging out with her goat friends, how content our kids were on the drive, and how to them this road trip was THE MOST FUN EVER. They didn’t know what it was “supposed” to look like.
If you need to hear this too, this is your reminder to let go of expectations a little and see where the road takes you.
Oh and by the way, the pizza was bangin’ and well worth the wait and we found a $10 bill in the farm parking lot, so we’re basically rich and the universe had our back after all.
