On The Things That Go Right

A couple weeks ago, I was running late to my Friday 9:00 AM Organic Chemistry section. I had missed the shuttle to class by about a minute and was frantically speed walking to the Science Center. The day already wasn’t going too well: earlier that morning, some lunch plans with friends fell through and then I found out I was supposed to be tutoring an extra hour that I hadn’t planned to work. I was stressed, tired, a little out of breath, and a lot ready for the week to be done.

I was walking down the final straightaway to the Science Center when, out of nowhere, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned to find, right behind me, was one of the guys from my program in Mexico last summer. He said hi, made a joke about how funny I looked speed walking down the street (headphones in and with a determined gaze toward the Science Center building), then proceeded himself to speed walk to whatever morning class he had. It was a brief interaction, but somehow, it changed the dynamic of my day quite a bit.

Maybe it was that his joking comment lightened the mood on a stressful morning. I did kind of look like a Harvard stereotype as I sped down the street and I wouldn’t have stopped to appreciate the humor of it until he pointed it out. Or maybe it was just nice to know that someone, who looked equally busy and was probably late to his own thing, cared enough to stop and say hi. He and I hadn’t even been particularly close on the trip; it would have been easy for him to walk right past me and say nothing, especially since I hadn’t noticed him. Instead, he chose to say hi, and it felt good to know that, eight months after the last time we hung out, I wasn’t totally irrelevant to this guy’s life.

I think I often tend to do this thing where I judge the quality of my day based on one small thing that goes wrong in the morning. Missed the shuttle? Guess it’s gonna be an unlucky day for you! Forgot something you needed for the day in your room? Today’s gonna be a long day.

But that morning, I chose instead to focus on the one small thing that went right: the pleasant surprise of bumping into someone I hadn’t seen in a while. I considered how it was actually a good thing that I had missed the shuttle; if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been on the street at that time to run into my friend from Mexico. This positive thinking set me up for a better rest of the day. I focused better in Orgo. My tutoring sessions were more productive. I made new lunch plans, and even finished more work than I had expected to. Though the day started off rocky, I’m glad I didn’t let myself keep wallowing in my own self-pity about everything that was going wrong in the morning. It would have just been a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Since that Friday, I’ve been trying to make a more concerted effort to focus on the small things that do go right in any given day. It sounds like simple advice, but it’s not always that easy to follow, at least for me. It’s a lot easier to find something imperfect than it is to appreciate something that was just a little above average. And once you let yourself start thinking negatively, even if only for a bit, it can turn into a whole chain of pessimism pretty fast. I’ve been trying to write down some of the small good things that happen each day, or at least each week. That way, I hold myself accountable to remembering to think positive.

In keeping my list so far, I’ve noticed that a lot of the things that do go right in my day tend to involve small acts of kindness from other people. For example, about a week ago, I was really stressed by all the work I needed to finish before spring break. I had stayed up working until 2 A.M. one night, but because it was Daylight Saving’s, I actually ended up staying up until 3 A.M. by accident. I hadn’t had time to shave or shower, and I felt really gross walking around the next day as I ran from extracurricular commitments to p-set groups to midterm studying. That night, I was on Snapchat with one of my friends, talking about something unrelated, when she screenshot one of the selfies I sent her and sent it back with the message “I stared at this picture for like 10 seconds being like ‘wow that’s such a good picture of Ariel.’” On a day when I was feeling disheveled and gross, that one message really improved my self-esteem. I realized that for all the wrong I was seeing in my day, someone else was seeing something going right. There was no reason I couldn’t also see the good in myself and my day.

That’s just one example of many other little good things that happened in the last week alone. There was also the day when my friend—who’s currently studying abroad in France, in a completely different time zone—sent me a good luck message the morning of my Stat midterm. Or the day a friend I bumped into serendipitously on my way to lab lent me her noise-cancelling Bose headphones because I forgot my own ear buds in my room, on the other side of campus. I could have written either of these days off as “bad days,” destined to go wrong. In the former example, I had a midterm early in the morning followed by a long day of classes and tutoring. In the latter, I was late to lab because of a massive delay on the red line, and when I finally got to lab, it turned out I also forgot my I.D. Instead, though, each time something went wrong or felt stressful, I reminded myself of the nice things my friends had done to ensure I would have a good day. Appreciating these small acts of kindness—these small things that actually went right—made for smoother and happier days.

I’m trying to step out of the binary way of thinking that a day is either all good or all bad. Especially in the middle of a semester, when there’s so much going on, there are always going to be things that don’t go as planned. When I take time to recognize the little things that do go well (and there are often a lot of them, if I really stop to think about it!), then the things that go wrong don’t actually have to set me back too much at all.