The art of keeping life’s little problems in perspective

My new computer died.

It was only six months old, and now it needs a full refurb because of a hardware issue. Luckily, I’d held onto my old workhorse, so I still had a functioning machine while the new one went into the shop. I was frustrated, of course.

Then I got home, turned on the news and remembered that a broken computer is a problem, not a crisis.

With everything going on in the world, I wasn’t about to let a broken computer make me crazy. That didn’t stop me from waking up half-obsessed with getting my data back, worried I’d lost documents and photos I hadn’t backed up.

Each call to tech support started to feel like a waste of time. Then I realized I was learning things about my machine I’d never known. So I decided to treat the whole ordeal as a lesson instead of a loss. The files would turn up eventually. In the meantime, I could still get on with my life.

In times like these, the real skill is deciding what’s worth letting twist you up and what isn’t.

Things break, but most things can be repaired. I’d bet we spend more energy worrying about losing our phone for an afternoon than about the actual state of our families and our lives. That’s not an argument for not caring. It’s an argument for choosing where to spend your worry.

Let go of what’s out of your control. I know that’s easier said than done, but doing so can lighten your stress load and leave more room for the things that really matter.

The one thing that can’t break is you. It’s easy to get tangled up imagining every way something could go wrong and forget to look for the fix. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is pause, take a breath and focus on what you can control.