When the Glass Is Only Half Full

When people talk about the power of positive thinking, sometimes they slip over the rails into "blind optimism with no regard for reality."  While I do think it's important to see the possibilities in a situation, I also think it's important to line up one's expectations and actions with practical reality.  Glass-half-empty thinking is problematic because it always reveals the shortcomings of a situation, but glass-half-full thinking runs the risk of ignoring pitfalls, or at least pretending that they don't exist in the hopes that luck will claim victory over logic.  Someone who sees the glass half empty is more likely to see that there is an issue crying out for a solution, but if you believe in the detrimental impact of negative thinking, accomplishing that solution can be a struggle for the pessimist who sees every glass as somewhere between half-empty and bone dry.

Which is why I have endeavored to formulate a new take on the glass: it's only half full.  It is on the road to being full, but it isn't there yet.  It isn't half empty, but it's only half full.  There is still work to be done, and that work can have a positive impact.  There's no reason to lament that the glass isn't full, but if a full glass is what you want, you can't ignore the fact that the glass simply isn't full yet.  It's half full, though, which is better than being less than half full.  To me, it amounts to recognizing whatever goal the full glass represents and acknowledging that I have covered some ground and still have a bit more to do.  When there is room for improvement, I can take action.  That's what the glass being only half full symbolizes to me.

All of this has come into play this week because of a job opening accompanying a program that involves playing the same music twice a day, five days a week.  If I go for the position, I could be working with some great people, and I would be facing the challenge of mental and artistic tedium.  The scarcity-theorist within me urges me to jump at it because it's the only accompanying offer on the table at the moment, but strategically, the timing of this position would eliminate any possibility of teaching a university course in the next year or accompanying college recitals or high-school solo and ensemble events.  As I spoke with a couple of people in the know about the opportunity, it dawned on me that I was selling myself a bit short.

It's true that I don't have a ton of opportunities for musical collaboration on the table at this moment, but that doesn't mean that I have to accept a position that is (by all reports) less than what I want.  Just because I want a full glass doesn't mean that I have to throw in anything that will raise the water line.  It matters what I want the glass to be full of.  (Horrible grammar, but still...)  My first step is to define what would equate to a full glass.  Then I can recognize that, at this moment, my glass is only half full.  That leads to identifying what I can do to get the glass a little closer to full.

When I start thinking that the glass is half empty, it can spark a bit of panic.  I have to do something about filling up the glass.  Anything.  That's often not a terribly helpful line of thinking.  I prefer what happens when I think that the glass is only half full right now.  Sometimes, when I take a step back, I realize that it's actually a little more than half full.  Sometimes I think that the glass will never be completely full.  And that's OK. 

Blinded By Anger

I felt angry. My immediate response was to discount the feeling and list the myriad reasons why I shouldn't be angry. Anger doesn't solve anything. I had no right to be angry about the situation. Anger isn't attractive or inspiring. Anger is irrational. Anger isn't productive. In fact, it's destructive. So I denied myself the opportunity to fully feel angry for all of those reasons, and I told myself that I needed to just "let go" of my anger in order to create what I want. In essence, I needed to let go of what I was feeling in order to be acceptable to myself.

Refusing to fully acknowledge the emotion didn't change the fact that I was feeling angry. And one of the things I was angry about was not being able to clearly see my next step in developing my business. I was angry at myself for being so busy doing that I wasn't leaving much time for enjoying what I was doing. Sure, I was doing lots of things I expect to contribute positively to what I'm creating, but I wasn't seeing results from some of those activities. And I didn't know why. Was I not being patient enough? Were my expectations off base? Would those particular activities actually benefit me? I couldn't answer the questions, and I felt angry about it.

I was actually angry about a lot of things. Little things that I told myself I really shouldn't be angry about. But whether I wanted to be or not, I was angry. Thanks to a good friend, I was able to see that I had trapped myself by wrestling with the emotion instead of just feeling it and expressing it (in a safe and non-destructive way). It made sense that I couldn't see a way forward from where I was standing. My energy was focused on denying myself a legitimate emotion.

Once I accepted that I felt angry and expressed it, I realized one of the issues that had me frozen in my journey. I was doing things without a means to measure them, and it is impossible for one to evaluate something that isn't being measured. I also realized that part of my anger was stemming from the fear that if I stop engaging in one of those potentially valuable activities, I could sabotage my efforts. So I was caught in a snare of not allowing myself to stop doing something that may be effective, and not giving myself a way to determine its effectiveness. No wonder I was angry about that.

With my anger expressed, I started to see that I can create a way to measure what I'm doing, to evaluate whether it's really having the result I expect. And I started to see that there are plenty of things that I enjoy doing that will support what I am creating. If I stop putting my effort into one ineffective activity, I'm not hogtying myself or limiting my potential for success. There are other ways to create what I want. I don't have to lock myself into one particular irrevocable path.

In the midst of my anger, I was the victim of everything, including my own decisions. As long as I wrestled with whether or not I should be angry, I would remain a blind victim. On the other side of that anger being expressed, my vision is much clearer. And I can laugh at my perceived victimhood as I step through the chains of my self-imposed limitations.

Creativity Reigns

We had three bids to repair the wall that the termites had eviscerated. All three of the contractors we called are registered with the Better Business Bureau with no complaints, and we knew people who had used all three of them for one thing or another. We were both pleased and disappointed with their bids. The highest bid was about what we had expected the lowest bid to be, but there was still quite a bit of price differential. We didn't want to go with the lowest bid on price alone. (Well, we did, but we were a little scared to.) At the same time, we didn't want to go with the high bid and assume that the quality of work would be equally high.

Because of the radical price difference, we felt certain that a couple of the contractors were leaving something out, so we started comparing the quotes and asking questions. Two of the companies went into great detail to tell us how much work was actually involved and what problems they expected to encounter along the way. The third seemed to be fairly confident about the whole job. When we brought up the problems the other two had postulated, he proposed a very workable solution for each one that made the problem seem like much less of an ordeal. These issues were not matters of building code or safety, but cosmetics and simplicity.

Two of the contractors were reacting to what they initially saw and what their immediate thoughts were about the situation. They weren't really putting themselves out to find a different way to address the issues; their first impulse about the way to solve the problem was good enough. Maybe that's because they wouldn't be paying for them. The third contractor was a little more savvy. The challenges that would go along with this job had simple solutions, they just required a little creativity and a willingness to think about the possibilities before relegating oneself to a single answer. His attitude assured us that, if unforeseen problems arose, this guy would take a step back and figure out a reasonable way to address them. The other two could spend a lot of time and money trying to make things work the way they thought things had to work.

In the end, we decided to go with the cheapest of the bids we received, but it had little to do with money. We could afford any of the bids, truth be told. The bottom line was that we trusted in a particular contractor's creativity.