What do you do when the power goes out?
I’ve been without power since yesterday around 4:30 PM. I kept thinking it would come back on, but it hasn’t.
The storms in Texas have caused hundreds of thousands of people to be without power the past few days and it sounds like 100,000 homes are out just in the area I live in alone, in Dallas.
Driving around to try and catch a yoga class last night seemed impossible. And actually it was because I didn’t make it in time. Most of the stoplights were out. I had people jet out in front of me running these imaginary stoplights and it seemed that frustrated people were all around. Once I made it to where I wanted to go, I couldn’t even find a parking place because the shopping center was so packed with people circling around three floors of a parking garage to find a space, so I just left and went to eat dinner instead.
It took my boyfriend 3 hours to get home last night and it took my sister an hour and 1/2 to drive a mile and 1/2. She had her 2-year-old little girl in the car and had to get creative on how to entertain her. She picked up dinner in the car and just improvised with what was in front of her until she got home. Smart woman 🙂
It was hot last night and a little hard to sleep, but it made me think about all of the things that we take for granted and it made my gratefulness journal easy to write in this morning. I am grateful that I have a comfortable bed to sleep in and that I can find rest. I am grateful that I have electricity (normally ;). I am grateful that I have things that keep me warm and cool me off when I sleep. I am grateful that we have the ability to switch a switch on the wall and can automatically see much better. It’s amazing how even after hours of walking around with a flashlight and seeing by candlelight, you still switch it on out of habit over and over again. It made me laugh each time.
We can complain, get worked up in traffic, yell, scream and get frustrated and feel like crap or we can decide to enjoy the silence when lying in bed thinking about what it was like for people back in the day when they had no electricity and count all the things we have to be grateful for and look forward to when we have it again. I’m choosing the latter.
So, as I sit here on a hard bench in a restaurant in a tiny spot where I could find an outlet to charge my phone, be on my computer and get wifi, I’m grateful that I could find a place to get some work done. I’m also choosing to find things I can appreciate about the others surrounding me that our in the same situation I am after catching myself from starting to be annoyed that their voices were too loud and annoying because they were so close to me 🙂 I promise life is much more fun this way.
What can you choose to be grateful for despite your circumstances today?