Add Context

Dinnertime at our house is a tricky affair.

Somedays, everything works out.

Whatever I've spent a fair amount of time cooking is well received by our kids, the kids don't bicker or argue, and in general the mood at the table is happy.

Other days, dinnertime sucks.

We may have three or four happy days in a row, followed by one sucky day.

That one sucky day, makes me feel as though all we've ever had are sucky days.

It makes me wish we could just take "food" pills and be done with the charade.

How come the sucky days have such power?

***

There's something universal about this.

Things can be going swimmingly, and then one sucky thing comes along and wipes out all the positive things.

It makes you question if there was ever something positive to begin with and perhaps even ask, will there ever be positive again?

I'm not a psychologist, though I am certain there is a term for this idea already.

As I was thinking through this, I realized that it's rooted in an idea I've written about before.

***

Good things take time to accumulate.

Bad things can happen all at once.

We would need weeks of good dinners in a row, in order to not really feel the gut-punch of a bad dinner.

Even then, we'd still probably feel it.

So, you might be wondering, how do we make things that suck, suck less?

***

A method I've found useful is to add context.

A little while ago, during one particularly sucky dinnertime, I asked my wife, "Is this our new normal? It feels like all we have are bad dinners."

She didn't think so. She said we've actually had a few good ones recently.

I couldn't see them. I was blinded by the suck.

So, we pulled out an old trick: we kept count.

For a two-week period, I counted the amount of good dinners vs. bad dinners.

I added context to the sucky moments.

Over the next 14 dinners, we just had two that sucked.

The sucky days still had power, this just made them have less of it.