Some days you get to experience stupid

I have certain philosophies about life that you will hear me expound on quite often.
One of those happens to be the idea that everything happens for a reason. I don’t believe in accidents. I believe life is a classroom, every experience is a lesson, and every person in our life is a teacher. This is a strongly held belief of mine.
That being the case, how do you explain yesterday?
I got up at 4am (yes 4am) to run down to the KSL TV studio in Salt Lake to do my Monday LIFEadvice segment. It is Morning Show protocol that when I arrive, I call my producer to come let me in (When you arrive in the middle of the night there’s apparently no one at the front desk.)
When I told her I was there, her response was, “Why are you here?”
“What do you mean why am I here? It’s Monday. I’m here to do my segment.”
“But you aren’t scheduled for today.”
She explained they were planning on me next Monday and I had gotten the days mixed up. They didn’t have the segment slotted today and they couldn’t use me. She also explained that last week when she had said she wanted to move my segment from 6:15am to 5:45am she had only meant that week, not forever. I thought she meant forever so I had arrived eariler than usual.
Knowing that you got out of bed, at a ridiculous hour in the morning, for nothing, is a little frustrating!
Usually when frustrating things happen I calm myself down with thoughts like, “I wonder why this experience showed up in my life?” “What am I supposed to learn from this?” This is my way of trusting God and the Universe that I’m always where I’m supposed to be and seeing my life as a classroom.
It would comfort me to believe that I was supposed to get the dates mixed up for some interesting reason, or at least, there was somethng I was supposed to learn from this frustrating experience?
But in this case, I couldn’t come up with any good reason for my stupid mistake (expect maybe that I need to pay more attention).
I went home and worked on my book, so I was accomplishing something worthwhile, but I was really tired and bothered with myself for being so dumb.
The funny part is, this isn’t the end of the story.
At 3:30 that day I had a doctors appointment to check the progress of my arm surgery last month. So I jumped in the car and drove from Bountiful to 53rd south to the new IHC Medical Center. I had to hurry with this appointment because I had a client coming to the house at 5pm for a session. It knew it was going to be close.
When I arrived I checked in at the nurses station and told them I was here to see the Doctor, their response was oddly familiar, “Why are you here now?”
“For my appointment.”
“We don’t have you down today and the Doctor isn’t even here, he is at the Avenues office today.”
Suddenly I remembered, when I’d made the appointment they told me that I would have to go the Avenues office, but I hadn’t written that part down in my ipad, and it was too late to drive to the other office and still make it home in time.

Now, when you do something (this dumb) once, you can over look it. When you do it twice, on the same day, you have to wonder what’s wrong with you.
Seriously – twice in one day?
As I drove home, I pondered about why this experience had shown up in my life. Was there some divine reason? Was there a lesson I needed to learn from this? And do you know what thought came into my mind at that moment…
“Some days you just get to experience stupid.”
It is one of the many of human experiences we each get to enjoy on our journey through life. We each will get to experience feeling stupid on occasion (some of us more often than others) but there are interesting lessons these experience bring us.
We may learn patience with ourselves and other people. We may gain understanding and empathy for other people when they have stupid days. We might become less judgemental and self righteous when we get a dose of our own stupid. The bottom line is, this experience is good for us.
So the next time you get to experience stupid – see it for what it is.
Don’t waste time stressing about it, beating yourself up, complaining or ranting about it. Just sit back and feel it. Soak up the moment and really enjoy what the stupid experience feels like. See it as a lesson, not a reflection on your value.
Choose NOT to experience shame around it. Shame does you no good whatsoever. Shame is the feeling that you “Should Have Already Mastered Everything.” How ridiculous is that? If you knew it all, you wouldn’t need to be here.

Embrace your less than brilliant moments because they just prove you’re human like the rest of us. We are all struggling human beings in process and every day’s a lesson. Remember… Your not a stupid person… you’re just experiencing stupid today…
…and some days are like that.