Have you ever had the feeling that you can’t win? That no good deed goes unpunished? That’s how this week has rolled at my house. My daughter sent the opening salvo. I was working at the computer the other day when she came into the house. My back was to her. My older daughter exclaimed, “Oh my goodness! WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?” Naturally, this comment got my attention. I swiveled around and was met with the image of a very wet, very muddy, and very distressed 11- year- old.
She was trying to do something good. Her class had been learning about taking care of the environment. She asked if she and her friends could go pick up trash in the woods behind our house. They wandered off the trail and over to the edge of the creek. When she leaned over to pick something up, the iPhone that Santa brought this Christmas fell out of her pocket and went for a swim. Not a short swim either. Fifty minutes after splashdown she showed up in my kitchen. She was desperate to solve this problem.
Teamwork is best in these kinds of situations so we gathered up her sisters and went down to the creek. It was a lost cause. She didn’t appreciate the irony of polluting the creek with an electronic device while trying to rid the creek of trash. Her good deed went wrong.
Been there, right? Best intentions and all of that stuff? To make matters worse in her mind, she was now responsible for replacing the phone. My husband and I are working really hard to promote financial literacy for the kids. One way we do this is teaching them about insurance. They were all offered (parent provided) insurance for their gadgets. It comes at the low price of $1 per month. It covers things like breakage, theft, or loss of phone. She refused to buy the insurance, preferring to hold on to her $1. I tried diligently to convince her to buy a policy. To no avail. She was not going to waste her money on something as nontangible as insurance.
This was a hard lesson. She sat in bed that night and cried. She couldn’t see a way out. She didn’t have enough money to replace the phone. She was overwhelmed. I empathized. Overwhelmed is a big emotion. It can paralyze you if you aren’t careful. Adults get overwhelmed sometimes with really serious subjects. Disease. Divorce. Foreclosure. Unemployment. But in her world, this was a really big deal. Her emotions were true.
By the next morning, my little girl had a plan. One that I didn’t think would work. She was going to sell her hand drawn cartoons. She took a card table and art supplies and set up shop at the front of the neighborhood. At the end of 2 days of work she had enough to cover the gap between what she had in savings and the cost of the phone.
If only it were that easy for all of us. But as is often the case, we can learn from the little children. She didn’t wallow in self-pity for very long. She came up with a game plan. She worked for it. She was flagging cars down and pitching her artwork. She was successful beyond my wildest dreams. Not only is she back in the black, but another neighbor commissioned some custom work when he saw how good her cartoons were. She didn’t get in her own way. She didn’t stop to think…this won’t work…I’m not good enough…people will think I’m ridiculous. She didn’t have the expectation of I CAN’T. She wasn’t afraid to try.
“Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark, professionals built the Titanic.” –author unknown
I’m not sure which one of us learned the bigger lesson from her experience. I need to remember to stop sometimes and look at problems through a fresh lens, free of all my nagging feelings of self-doubt or inadequacy. It has been a busy week. My son has taken up fishing in the creek. He slipped and fell in. Guess what was in his pocket? The iPhone from Santa. And we keep on running in the circle of life.
“Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” Galatians 6:9