Roll with it, baby

Today I tried to teach one of my favorite adult students online.

She couldn’t find the Zoom link in her email. (It had been sent to her junk folder, thank you Apple).

We connected on Zoom. About one minute in, my screen froze. My Internet connection tanked.

Xfinity app was earnestly helpful: “You appear to be offline.”

My dear student and I exchanged text messages, agreeing that The Universe Had Spoken and today was not a good day for us to meet, so we rescheduled.

SpongeBob Time Card for the win

After twice rebooting the router and once rebooting the computer - success. Internet restored.

Is it frustrating? Certainly. I wanted to hang with my student, hear what’s going on, make some music. Instead, I caught up on some office admin stuff, ate a real breakfast, and had a second cup of coffee.

It didn’t derail me.

Made me think, though - how often I do actually get derailed by the unexpected? Maybe this gentle moment will come back around to remind Future Me that it doesn’t have to be a big deal.

I can’t control my circumstances, but I can control my response to them. Statements like that sound noble, such an enlightened human! But in the grit of actual living, our brains shuffle platitudes like that to the sidelines when in the pressure of the actual moment.

Here’s hoping that the baby steps of this morning will enable me to take larger ones later.