Photo by sergio souza from Pexels — Photo by **sergio souza** from **Pexels**

This past weekend, my wife and I celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary. Before figuring out how to celebrate, we first had to figure out a few things.

We wanted to go out, but we had a some parameters. We live in Michigan and, for the moment, restaurants are still open for dine-in service. While I am sure that many restaurants have taken precautions to make their establishments safe, we’re not there yet regarding dining in. As a result, we decided to go somewhere with patio seating that faced the water. After settling on a few places, one worked out the best for us. As it turned out, this was the first time going there that patio seating was available. For us, this was something good that came out of celebrating our anniversary in a different than expected way.

Things Could Be Worse

While we savored our drinks and waited for our food to come, we reminisced on our ten years of marriage (although we have been together even longer). We thought about our blessings. Throughout these months at home, no one has become sick. Since we both work from home, it’s a bit easier to adjust to the schools’ decision to start the school year virtually without having to worry who will care for our son. Since we both still work, we are fortunate to afford going out to dinner. There are countless things that we are blessed with having and are thankful for them all. Did we ever imagine celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary within the context of some of today’s issues? Definitely not. However, we are fortunate that things are not worse for us.

Making Some Changes

As I wrote this post, we spent some of the following day reorganizing one of our bedrooms to make it a play/study room. It involved moving some furniture between our son’s bedroom and that spare room. There are still some things that don’t yet “have a home.” Undoubtedly, there will be some things that we’ll try to find another home elsewhere. I find that, especially in these times, there’s almost always somebody looking for what you may have. We have been on both ends of this equation. In time, we will make the best use of our space, which will make the considerable time spent at home easier to bear.

Going With It

So, as I look at how we decided to celebrate our anniversary and adapt to (for now) our son learning from home, so much changes from moment to moment. Logically, we already know this or we are painfully reminded. In practice, I think that many of us hope that things stay the same. When things do change, it causes us considerable distress. Lately, I have seen some of it in how some people choose to outwardly show it: in person or on social media.

I think back to one of my earlier posts, “Starting A New Normal, Yesterday Is Gone.” In that post, I wrote about working to focus on what we can/is within our control. Now, I would go one step further to ask that, once you can see what is within your control, you enjoy those associated blessings. Those small victories will help us learn to better deal with the relatively constant disruption that I see becoming our new reality. Returning to my decision for celebrating my anniversary as a metaphor, we could either focus on the places where you're not dining in or you can finding that place with patio seating. I think that, when you find what works for you, life will be lots more enjoyable.

ENJOY THE BLESSINGS STEMMING FROM THE THINGS THAT YOU CAN CONTROL.

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