This week has been A Week. I started off by a visit to my new Primary Care Physician, hoping that he would be a little more proactive than my old doc. He was, to my thinking, sorta mid. I got a bit of a scolding for taking as many nutritional supplements I do, as well as a mini-lecture on Doing It All Wrong when it came to caring for the long-term headache I’ve had since 2020. He then sent me off for lab work, where I caught the Rookie Phlebotomist who could not fine a good spot to draw blood, this from me, a critter with very pale skin and ultra-prominent veins and arteries. Tuesday was spent dawdling while a tech installed the very costly new transmission for our washing machine, and Wednesday we discovered we had a mouse in the house. No sooner had I noted to the Missus that I was pretty close to my stress limit than she was obliged to tell me that our dryer had apparently conked out.

Thanks to a lifetime of practice I could spend all day kvetching about it; I built those muscles long ago. But one lesson I’m trying to teach myself is that optimism, as a habit of mind, is really effortful. No one told me how much energy is required to look at things rightly.

Let’s take Mr. Mouse as an example. When we learned about him on Wednesday night, I was instantly down in the proverbial dumps. When we had a mouse last year we spent about two hours cleaning and sanitizing all the likely surfaces and four days trying to trap him. This year, in contrast, the catch and release process went just about ideally. We already had traps that we knew worked, we already knew where to set them, and we already knew which bait to begin with. I broke the clasp on one of the humane traps while setting it, but I was able to close it back up with packing tape. And when I woke on Thanksgiving morning I heard the mouse before I saw him, since he was trying to lift the lid with the millimeter of give that the packing tape allowed. I immediately went to dispose of him and the taped trap at a faraway dumpster at about 4:30am, and my repair job allowed me to release the top easily, giving the little feller a fighting chance at finding warmth on a cold winter day. From discovery to eviction, the whole process took about nine hours, a very speedy resolution to what could have been a week-long stressor.

It didn’t take me too long to realize how fortunate we were in the case of the mouse, but most things can be hauled out into the sun with a little effort. At one level it sucked to have another few hundred dollars fly out of our accounts for the washer repair, but we got it done in a span of five days, including the weekend, and the fix is under warranty for a year. The dryer failure was a downer, but by the morning the Missus had already figured out how to install a new heating element for about $55, a plan that she confirmed with an electrician friend of ours.

I am, as the cosmos can attest, a habitual worrier. Of the three major sources of stress–guilt, regret, and worry–the latter is number one with a bullet for me. I fret about the future quite a lot, and often in very dumb ways; I can get myself worked up in minutes over a big bucket of nothing (see, for example, my short-lived conviction that the guy who fixed the washer sabotaged the dryer during his visit). Left unchecked, I would spend the whole winter fretting about ice and wind damage to the Abbey.

But in virtually every instance–if always with significant cognitive effort–there is some roundabout way of finding excellent reasons for feeling more sanguine about seemingly bleak situations. I’m still learning to be patient with myself as I process the initial “Alas! Why me?!” responses I have to many stressors, but I’m at least fractionally better at tamping down my (over)reactions to nothingburger worries about the far future, especially in those cases over which I have zero control.

I’m a piss-poor advice columnist, but I think it’s effort worth making. When we find ourselves run aground on some exasperating reversal, it can be worthwhile to take a little time and see if there are more positive, even optimistic ways, of looking at it. Instead of wondering “Why me?”, these days I’m trying out “What if this all turns out well?”