Last week an inconvenience turned into an opportunity to help someone.

I was meeting with someone I hoped to establish a mentoring relationship with.  I arrived at her office only to find her rushing out the door to take an unwell team member to the hospital.  It was slightly frustrating – the round trip took an hour out of my day and $4 in train fare.  We arranged to meet again the following day.

Next day I took myself back to the train station. At the station I was approached by a group of adults wanting to buy a train ticket – they were from out-of-town and didn’t know how to operate the ticket machine.  Another inconvenience.  I helped them buy their tickets then boarded the train.

Afterwards I thought to myself that while frustrating at the time, neither of these events was an inconvenience.  The missed meeting was setting me up to be in the right place to help out a group in need.  This reinforced to me something I already knew but don’t always keep in front of mind.  That while you can’t always control the things that happen to you, you can control how you respond to them.  While I forgot this last week in the moment, I now choose to see the missed meeting as an opportunity to be able to help someone, rather than something to be frustrated about.

Photo: An abandoned digger head left behind by the earth movers.