When I was in college, one of my graduation requirements was to take a foreign language class. Having already taken Spanish in high school, you’d think I would have wanted to take an intro Spanish class to fulfill the graduation requirement with the least amount of effort, but I wanted to change it up a bit. I’m not sure why, but German seemed like the most interesting choice available so I signed up. While most people I know find the German language to sound harsh and displeasing, I found it to be fascinating. I really enjoyed the class, and found that I was fairly good at it. So much so, that I actually took two more semesters of German later in my college career when I had to fill my schedule with elective courses to graduate.
I graduated in 2011 and thought that my journey of learning German had ended there. I still mentioned off-handedly every once in a while to my parents that I had added Germany to my list of travel destinations (mostly due to my time in college classes learning the language and customs of the country), but I never really thought anything of it.
Then came Christmas of 2014. It was a Christmas just like any other – I was visiting my parents and my parents, brothers and I were all enjoying our morning opening gifts. After all the gifts had been opened, I was going to start making a Christmas-morning breakfast, and my parents surprised me with one last gift. I opened it up and couldn’t believe my eyes . . . I was holding in my hands a full set of the Rosetta Language Learning program for German! I generally have a pretty good inkling of what my parents were getting me, but this caught me completely off guard! I hadn’t ever mentioned wanting a Rosetta Stone program, but my parents knew I would love it.
I installed the program and dove right in, hoping to pick up where I had left off during my years in college. As with most things I pick up though (as I mentioned in my very first post), I was very gung-ho about it for . . . a couple of weeks, and then I made excuses for myself to not continue on with it. So a very expensive and useful gift sat neglected. That is, until this week. I determined this week that I was going to re-commit to the Rosetta Stone program, and learning German.
Unfortunately, this proved to be easier said than done. With the program now being 6 years old, and being unused for over 5 years, the program needed a couple of updates. However, after updating, it still wouldn’t open properly. I checked to make sure that my computer met all of the necessary specifications, and determined that wasn’t the reason it wasn’t working anymore. After about an hour of trying to troubleshoot it myself, I decided to chat with their support team. After a brief explanation of my issue, I was advised that, due to the age of the version of the program I was using, it was all self-fixable and gave me the web address to the support page that would help me. I had already done some of the suggested fixes to no avail, but decided to exhaust all of my options (hey, this was a $500 thing that I had just wasted, I wanted to be able to use it! – better late than never) and spent another hour-ish following all of the other possible fixes available to me. The last-ditch fix was to completely uninstall and reinstall the program. After uninstalling and restarting the program, it appeared to have worked, but wanted me to insert the install disc to get started. Finally! I was making some real progress! Then, another hiccup. You see, I have had a CD in my laptop’s CD drive for . . . probably 4 or so years . . . and now my computer won’t eject the disc. With the laptop being a Mac, I can’t just open it up and take the disc out on my own, I’ve got to make an appointment with the Apple store to have them open it up and get the disc out. This whole process had me so frustrated, I actually said (out loud) “well, I guess this is just a sign that I’m not meant to learn German” (yeah, yeah, yeah, melodramatic, I know).
Now, what is the point of that unnecessarily long anecdote? Well, it brings me (very slowly) to this week’s topic: changing your perspective.
About 3 seconds after I said that bit about not being meant to learn German, I had to chastise myself (this part, at least, was internal). No, of course it wasn’t “a sign that I’m not meant to learn German.” It was a ‘sign’ that the world is full of obstacles, some big, and some small (this one obviously is an example of the latter), and you’ve got to find a way to overcome them – not just give up at the first sign of inconvenience. Quite often, our quality of life can be changed pretty drastically by simply changing our perspective of things happening in our lives, even if the circumstances themselves don’t change.
What do I mean by that? Well, as I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been in a bit of a rut lately. A big portion of that is dissatisfaction with my current job. I work in a toy shipping warehouse, and the job (though VERY easy) is mind-numbingly boring, and seemingly pointless. I was getting in the mindset of ‘what’s the point of this job? Nobody needs any of the things we’re shipping out to them; we’re not making any kind of difference to anyone’ and it was making it harder and harder to get out of bed to go to work every day. Then, last week Friday, when I was standing at my station boxing up some toy to send who-knows-where and bumming about my predicament, I felt a lightbulb go off in my head. Sure, what we do at my work isn’t changing the world or progressing humankind or anything like that. But that kid that gets their game or toy or whatever in the mail will have their day improved, even just a little bit, and that means there’s a little more happiness in the world, even just for a small portion of time. Ever since then, it has been easier to go to work, and my overall outlook has improved quite a bit, even though nothing has actually changed about my situation.
If you’ve ever seen The Lego Movie, you have heard the annoyingly catchy song “Everything Is Awesome”. While you can probably only hum the chorus to yourself right now, there are a couple lines in the song pretty well embody the point I’m trying to make here. In one of the lines, it says “Life is good, cause everything is awesome. Lost my job, there’s a new opportunity; more free time for my awesome community” and later: “Stepped in mud, got new brown shoes . . .” While losing your job and stepping in mud in your new, white shoes are both obstacles (again, one much larger than the other), choosing to view them in an optimistic perspective, rather than letting them ruin your day (or week, or however long) can do wonders for your psyche and overall outlook on life.
As I’ve said before, happiness is a choice. Part of that choice is choosing to look at things in an optimistic way, rather than pessimistically. More often than not, we can’t choose what happens to us, or what goes on in the world around us, but we CAN always choose how we react to it and respond to it. I’m not saying that I’m perfect at this, because I still have days where I fall in to the “everything sucks, this is awful” mindset, and I have a bad day. But the point is, I’m trying to be more conscious of how I look at life, and trying to pick out the good in every day.
I’m sorry that this post was much more rambling than usual, and that the theme again seems to be something along the lines of “search for happiness,” but I feel like it’s important for us to do. In a way, this whole blog is a tool for my own search for happiness, and if I can share some of my thoughts and have them resonate with others and help them find their own happiness, I feel very good about that.
As always, thank you for taking the time to read this, and if you have any comments, thoughts, or suggestions, please feel free to leave them below. See you all next Thursday!
Musings Of A Struggling Creator 