Did you catch that large table-sized hole in the middle?
I had some family over to visit right after Thanksgiving and casually mentioned to my cousin Sue that I was thinking about replacing my dining room table. There wasn't anything wrong with it, other than I was tired of it after about ten years. Sue was the person who guided me through decorating my house when I moved in, and she did such a solid job that to this day I feel like the only way I know I'm making the right choice about changing anything is if she approves.
Days after I mentioned I was thinking about replacing the table, I started getting texts from her, pictures of tables she found while out shopping or looking online or finding in print ads. She loves doing this kind of thing, so she saw my half-hearted mention of kind of maybe thinking about a new table as an opportunity. I told her it probably wouldn't be something I was going to bother with much until we got closer to summer break (the time of the year I seem wait to do a lot of big decision-making), so she pulled back and put some of her ideas on hold. For my view, the biggest problem was going to be how to get rid of the table before I could even think about a new one.
Then about a month ago one of my co-workers put a message on Facebook saying how her twin daughters were getting a place to live and needed furniture. I showed her a picture of my table and said it was available, but the girls already had one lined up. However, she was still interested in taking it off my hands for her son's apartment, and before long we made a deal. BOOM!
I went online and ordered the table I'd had my eye on for awhile, and learned then it wasn't going to be available for nearly a month. I panicked a tiny bit, wondering what I was supposed to do without having a table for that long. And let's face it: Furniture delivery schedules always come with a certain amount of flexibility that don't always favor the customer.
I thought about what it was going to mean, then quickly arrived at a "So what?" I have a kitchen counter and a living room TV tray I could use for meals. Anything else I used the table for I could use the counter for just as easily for a few weeks. I figured if anything, not having the table there would give me an opportunity to do some serious floor-cleaning more easily, and it might even help build anticipation about the new table being on the way.
I took what was really a minor inconvenience and turned it around into a small positive. In most cases, I at least try to look at small setbacks as being little more than footnotes in a life story; events that, at the time, seem significant enough that they could require elaboration later on to tell the whole story, but not necessarily significant enough to be included in the main text. As odd as it has been for a few weeks, years from now I know I'll think about this time as just being that month I was waiting for the table to show up.
We all have footnotes like that, and not all of them are bad things. A great weekend or a memorable vacation can be referenced in just a few words. A period in your life when you feel weighed down with stress and concerns could be summed up as "the summer I was..." or "that one time when...." It's easy to get caught up in how heavy those things can feel when they're actually happening, but life always goes on the way it does.
And sometimes, if you're patient enough, you get to have a new kitchen table when those times are resolved!
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