Today I canceled our 2000 mile bicycle trip. There were just too many obstacles, mostly there were too many campgrounds closed. Riding a bicycle on a long trip requires that you ride between 50 and 80 miles each day, and with so many closed campgrounds it was impossible to find a place to camp about half of the nights. I rearranged the route about a hundred times trying to figure out how to make it work. I found every open campground in Oregon, California, Nevada, Idaho, and Washington and tried to connect the dots in a variety of ways, and finally at 4:00 pm in a fit of frustration I deleted everything on my computer that had anything to do with bicycle trips.

On my drive home this evening from the church after “Men’s Prayer”, I thought, well, at least I still have the salmon fishing trip to Alaska in July to look forward to. At dinner tonight Tim called and said he was cancelling the Alaska Salmon fishing trip because of lack of interest and all the hassles of trying to work with all the changing fishing rules caused by the fear of the coronavirus. Oh, great! I guess I will take my grandkids fishing more, and golf more this summer.

Managing disappointments is a skill that every person ought to have mastered by the time they are 20 years old. Life is full of disappointments and if you don’t have the mental discipline to rise above them you will become a perpetual Eeyore that no one enjoys being around.

For every disappointment there is a least one equal, if not greater positive event to see and focus on. If a person consciously works at looking for them and choosing to think about them after awhile your brain does it automatically and the transfer from the disappointment to the new positive becomes almost seamless.

It is going to be a good summer!