Life's Course

originally posted on Aug 7, 2009

Every night, I make sure both Bea and I are already in bed by 9pm. It’s good enough time to be sure Bea begins dozing off by 930 after we read books and she tells me things she did for the day. There was one night though when long after 930 and I asked her to stop talking that she kept on singing nursery rhymes and talking to herself. When I checked the time though it was way past 11pm then so naturally I got mad and told her she absolutely must sleep because it’s already so late.

The first time I reprimanded her, she quieted down for a few minutes but went on to singing again. The second time I called her attention, my voice was sterner and it was obvious to her I was already mad. What she told me though in response came to me as a surprise:

“But mommy, what can I do? I can’t sleep. What could I do?”

This definitely shut me up because even I wondered the same thing because as an adult, there are really nights when sleep eludes you, that no matter how hard you try or no matter how tired you were from the day, you just couldn’t sleep. But as an adult, we could do lots of things to kill time until we find ourselves getting sleepy such as watch tv, read books, write, surf the net. We basically can busy ourselves with other things until our body tells us it’s ready to shut down and go to sleep.

But what can you expect a 3 year old to do when she couldn’t sleep? For Bea, it was to sing nursery rhymes and recount aloud the dialogue she hears from her precious DVDs. I realized then at such an early age, Bea already started doing what she would eventually find herself doing as she grows older which is to make the best out of a situation, to find means to make a seemingly dire situation better and more bearable.

When I was younger way until my early 20s, this definitely wasn’t one of my strongest traits. I have always been impatient, a brat in a sense that whenever I find myself in a situation I didn’t like or wasn’t my first choice, more often my first reaction was to whine and at times I let the situation ruin the rest of my day. But through the years, I learned obviously since I cannot always have things the way I want them, I have to learn how to adapt to certain situations gracefully and not let the bad ones get the better of me. I realized one should always have a Plan B for everything to make sure although one thing didn’t go as planned, you still could alter it such that you still get your way in the end. I basically just have a back-up plan for everything in case what I originally set out to do didn’t go as expected.

I admit having to always think of back-up plans could be tiring, frustrating and may seem pessimistic. But I guess seeing how my life turned out when clearly the course it took is in no way aligned to what I originally wanted, I learned I need to master the art of quickly reverting a bad situation into a good one. If it’s just me, I could probably just slip and not care and let myself wallow in the direness of things but with Bea, I vowed to myself that in any given situation, I must always rise up and come out better. I need now to always look at the brighter end of spectrum and do my best to get there.

And then just hope the results of Plan B will bring out the same kind of happiness and sense of fulfillment I expect to get out of Plan A. It may be a different course but I sure can only wish the results it will bring will be the same and maybe even better than the first one I set out to do.