How Much of Your Day Does One Bad Moment Get?

I was driving home one sunny afternoon feeling ridiculously good. The top was down on my VW Bug, the car Joe surprised me with for my 50th birthday. The music was turned way up and I was belting out Rush’s Dreamline, one of my favorite songs.

It was one of those completely ordinary moments when you suddenly realize, This is a pretty good life.

And then… BAM.

A teenage driver hit my car. Thankfully, no one was hurt. Somehow I managed to get him to pull over and while I was talking to the insurance company, I looked over and saw him smacking himself in the head, clearly upset about what he’d done.

Then I noticed his T-shirt: Choose Happiness.

Really? Because at that particular moment, the only thing I was choosing was not to completely lose my sh!t.

My beloved Bug had a substantial dent. Not the kind you pretend isn’t there. The kind that comes with insurance calls, estimates, a body shop and all the annoying things I had absolutely no intention of dealing with that week. I was beyond upset, and with very good reason.

But after the initial shock wore off, I noticed something about myself. The accident was over, but my brain was prepared to keep it going. I started thinking about the inconvenience, the repair, how much time this was going to take, why he hadn’t been paying attention and why this had to happen that day.

One bad thing had happened, but apparently my brain was prepared to turn it into an entire miniseries.

I’ve done this with much smaller things, too. A frustrating email arrives in the morning and somehow it’s still with me at dinner. Someone says something that rubs me the wrong way and I replay it six times. A plan falls apart and suddenly the whole day feels ruined.

The original thing may deserve a reaction. But sometimes I give it considerably more real estate than it deserves.

That’s what struck me about the accident. Five minutes before it happened, I had been driving with the top down, singing and thinking about how much I loved my life. Then someone hit my car and I was angry, rattled and staring at a giant dent in something I loved.

Both things were true.

The accident didn’t erase the good moment that came before it. And it didn’t have to own everything that came afterward.

I couldn’t undo what happened. I couldn’t undent the car through positive thinking, and I certainly wasn’t interested in “choosing happiness” while standing on the side of the road. But once the initial shock passed, I could decide how much more of my attention I wanted to give it.

That’s something I’m trying to get better at. Not pretending something doesn’t bother me or immediately searching for the silver lining, but noticing when something that happened in my day has started becoming the story of my day.

There’s a difference.

So the next time something goes sideways, maybe the question isn’t How do I turn this into something positive? Maybe it’s simply:

How much of my day does this deserve?

Sometimes it deserves an hour. Sometimes it deserves an afternoon. Some things are big enough to deserve much more than that.

But other times, maybe it gets the moment it happened in.

It doesn’t automatically get the rest of them.