Hello my friend,

I had an interesting week. 

Imagine you’re out of the country for a few months. You rented a parking space at a storage facility to park your car. Then one day you get a call from the storage company that they are under new management and they can’t find your car. They tell you the name of a towing company they use and to contact them to see if it had been towed. 

You contact the towing company on Monday. They say they towed your car, you owe $15,500 to get your car, and if you don’t pay up and pick up your car by Friday they’re transferring ownership of the car to them. On top of that, you’re out of the country for a few more weeks, the car keys are with you, and they would take at least two weeks to get to the U.S. by mail.

If that sounds a little specific, that’s because that is exactly what happened to me last week.

Oh boy. The situation was stressful to say the least. Talk about a lesson in attachment. 

Insurance doesn’t handle this sort of thing. AAA is no help. The Consumer Protection Department will take a few months to get back to me.

I called about a hundred lawyers who either didn’t respond or told me they don’t take these kinds of cases.

Normally, I’d panic. I’d stress. I’d worry. I’d lose sleep. I’d smoke, drink, and eat. But I know where that road leads. This time, thanks to enough time spent observing my own mind, I was ready to catch myself whenever I began to fall into despair.

Stuff and money can be replaced. Family, health, life, love, peace — these are the things that really matter.

I accepted that my car may be gone forever. Now the outcome didn’t matter. With that baseline assumption, anything better would be a welcome surprise.

I welcomed the storm of thoughts — finding hope and then losing it, thinking I had found a solution which ended up falling through. I enjoyed the wild display of emotions my body was showing me. It was like a really good drama/thriller.

I couldn’t control the outcome. I couldn’t control the thoughts that would pop into my head. But I could control my focus and my reaction to the thoughts and to the situation.

If my mind started to go down the gloom and doom road, I could steer it back into the sunshine. If panic started to take over, I could breathe, be present, and witness the whirlwind.

My biggest saviour was the mantra in my mind playing on repeat, “One step at a time.” If I worried about getting a lawyer and how to get my car at the same time, I would have been too overwhelmed to even get out of bed. If I worried about how I was going to get a signed and notarized letter to the tow truck company to release my car to someone on my behalf at the same time as worrying about if AAA would even pick it up from them without my being there, at the same time as worrying about if AAA would take it to a new storage facility on my behalf and park it there without me there to move in and sign the rental contract, I would have lost my mind.

This was my greatest lesson in all of this: No matter what major life event we’re going through, we can’t handle all of it all at once. But we can manage one step at a time. There is only this step. This moment. This one, tiny, manageable step. Focus only on this step. When the next one comes, focus only on that one. Before you know it, you’ll look back and you won’t be able to believe just how far you’ve come.

Resting in the stillness of the present moment, I had the peace and energy to call that 101st lawyer. The one who was shocked, who expressed empathy and support. The one who had a friend with a flat bed tow truck, who picked up my car from the tow company, who negotiated a reasonable price, and who offered to keep the car at their firm’s parking lot until my key could arrive in the mail.

It was quite a rollercoaster, but who doesn’t love a good thrill?

Whenever unfortunate events spring up in your life, remember this 3-step process for turning a bad day around:

1. Stay present and let the past go. Focus on your 5 senses.
2. Dissolve the ego that says this is “my” bad day by shining your light of consciousness on it.
3. Free yourself from the desire for things to always go a certain way by embracing every adventure with courage and optimism.

Life doesn’t always go the way we plan. Often it feels like one disaster and crisis after another. But even in the midst of disaster there is peace, there is beauty, and there is love. And that is something to always be grateful for. 

Much love,

Todd