Saturday the 14th...?

Forget Friday the 13th. Yesterday I had a perfectly normal, non-traumatic day. TODAY, however, was a doozy! The morning actually seemed positive and productive - I took a solo shopping trip and got several needed items as well as quite a few cute things for myself. In addition I had found myself in a bit of a babysitter crisis (I had dropped the ball on getting a sitter for Ben's work holiday party tonight) but one of our friend's daughters offered to swoop in and save the day so we were good there too.

Then this evening happened. In full disclosure, I am writing this the next day and therefore can look at this with a little more humor than I could last night. As we are driving to this "party," I discover it's not an official work party at all but rather just an informal gathering planned by a few of Ben's coworkers. Several minutes later, we arrive at our destination to discover that instead of the nice dinner with friends we thought it was, we walked into a dive bar in DC. To boot, it seemed there was quite an extensive ugly sweater/Santa Claus suit-wearing pub crawl we walked into the middle of. So now not only am I nervous about meeting Ben's coworkers for the first time (and making a good impression), I am now profoundly uncomfortable. I am dressed not SUPER nice but certainly nicer than 99% of the other people in this bar, a place I probably wouldn't have gone into when I was fresh out of college, much less now.

The other day, one of my meditation thoughts was to not let myself by "imprisoned by my comfort zones." I am not sure I could have been more imprisoned than I was last night. I am not good with life's curveballs; I don't adapt to surprises well. When we left last night I was a mess, feeling like the night was nothing short of awful. Now, looking back, I can see that while it was certainly less than fantastic, it wasn't all THAT bad. In the end Ben and I did get to spend some adult time together, which is never a bad thing. And I learned, or was reminded, that while life can throw wrenches in plans it is not the end of the world. I may never be naturally good at being flexible or going with the flow, but I can still learn from this situation and do a better job of stepping outside my comfort zones without totally losing my cool.