Just the other day, I stopped at a quaint coffee shop to cool down from the Dubai heat. Having a weakness for blueberry muffins, I ordered a low fat muffin and iced date coffee (delicious!). A few minutes and 3 candy crush lives later, I slice into my blueberry muffin to find that there was exactly one blueberry in the entire thing. One.
Naturally, I felt the urge to sass the waitress about the ridiculousness of this sole-blueberried catastrophe. I felt like Robert DeNiro in Casino, horrified at the injustice that I had suffered with the lack of blueberries in my muffin. Doesn’t this woman know how stressed I’ve been? I just wanted one damn low-fat muffin filled with juicy blueberries after this busy day running around in this heat (in my air conditioned car, mind you) – Can’t a girl catch a freaking break!
Dramatic, I know.
And then I took a deep breath – an exercise I’ve been encouraged to do to handle my anxiety – and thought, is this really worth stressing over? Seriously Chereen, get a hold of yourself. You have got to relax about the little things. The waitress didn’t bake it; it’s not her fault. And if you don’t eat the muffin that you’ve already sliced into, she’s going to throw it away and that’s no good either.
So I put on my big girl pants and ate the damn muffin. And it was good. Yeah, it was missing blueberries but it still tasted delicious, and sometimes you can’t always get things the exact way you want it.
Later that night, Karim, completely unaware of my blueberry incident, made me watch this grad speech where author David Foster Wallace explains that adult life is full of dreary and frustrating moments. And in these soul-crushing moments, we’re going to blame everyone else because our default is to believe the world revolves around us and our needs.
Coincidence?
Probably, but that’s not a very good ending to this post. So let’s just all assume it wasn’t a coincidence and that I have vowed to change my ways and how I handle things (which I honestly have) and then I ask you to do the same (which you should) and end this post with a sense of humanity and urge to change the world.
I invite you to watch both videos below as you eat a blueberry muffin and think of me.