New Year's Challenge and the Weekly Winners

I was tagged by my gal pal C of the Island, and I'm a bit behind, but since the New Year is only 6 days old, I think I can still slip this in.

The Think Different Challenge is all about finding something in your life you currently have negative thoughts or feelings toward (eg work or your mother-in-law), and deciding to look at it differently. It is about realizing that some things are just a part of life, so we may as well try to find the positives in them.

The rules for this writing project are:

Write a new blog post in which you “think different”. Follow my suggestions above, or be a bit different and interpret the challenge the way you want.
State that the post is a part of the Think Different Challenge and include a link and/ or trackback to this post so that readers know the rules of the challenge. Feel free to use the above banner (inspired, of course, by Seth Godin).
Include a link and/ or trackback to the blogger who tagged you.
At the end of your post, go ahead and tag some fellow bloggers. Don’t forget to let them know they have been tagged.
That’s it! Just sit back and enjoy reading peoples’ responses to the challenge.

I'm resolving (although I'm not big on resolutions for the New Year) to try to look at things from the others' standpoint, put myself in their shoes, as they say. I'm hoping that will give me more patience and a more positive outlook on life going forward for 2008. I think the events of the last week have made me look inwardly a bit more, to realize how fortunate I am, and to be more appreciative of life in general. Just to not sweat the small stuff.

My attitude started changing a bit during our drive to Ottawa/ Tremblant. A couple of examples of things that would normally REALLY annoy me, and how I reacted.

1/ Driving behind a car going about 80 km/h in a 100 km/h zone; a two lane highway, a winding road with dashed lines few and far between. Even Ian was frustrated (granted, he was in the driver's seat, me sitting comfortably next to him humming along to Yaz's "Move Out".) Even as a passenger, I would usually be fidgetting, looking ahead to see when the first available opportunity would be to pass.

When we finally managed to get by him, I took a quick look down to see who the driver was. As Ian whipped by, I said, "You know, maybe he just rented the car for the weekend to drive up to Tremblant, he's not that familiar with driving or with the car, and he's just being overly cautious because of the snow."

Ian thought that was very magnanimous of me. Very uncharacteristic of me as I am probably one of the most impatient people on the planet.

2/ Tim Horton's screwing up our drive-through order. I know, it's a little thing, but how difficult can a cup of coffee and donut or sandwich be? We did the drive-through on our way home so we wouldn't have to get off the road. I probably use drive-through too often which isn't very green of me. But we usually only do it if we've got the kids with us; ordinarily we'll go in.

This time, we added a couple of sandwiches to the equation. And I don't like my sandwiches toasted. Ian had to repeat the order about four times and they inevitably got it all wrong. They charged us for an extra donut, put extra sugar in my coffee, and they toasted my sandwich. Ian said, "Well,surprise, it's Tim's they usually get it wrong".

And then I thought about it, and said, "You know, they probably have a really hard time hearing our orders; I mean, I usually have a hard time hearing them squawk their static greeting at me from that little speaker." Ian had never really thought about it that way before. And to be honest, neither had I.

What are you going to think differently about? I'll tag:
Cherry
Badness Jones
Don Mills Diva
Gina

Green Mountain Country Mama

And now for the fun stuff!

Sibling Love

G and Pinky by the Fire

Flush from the Ski

Cookie Dance