Lessons from wire hangers

This time of the year is once again upon us.. time to trim the tree and get the house ready for the Christmas festivities to come.

I love our tradition of going out as a family and cutting our own tree, bringing it back home and decorating it. They even made a movie about us: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

So the tree is up, the lights installed, time for the bulb. I pull out a brand spanking new package of ornaments hangers. They look so pretty, all tidy up in a neat little package. Then I open up the said neat little package and it’s like an explosion happened when the hangers touched air. The entire contents gets tangled up like a stack of stupid coat hangers. … sighs…. OK , no biggy, I’ll just pull a few out and start hanging bulbs and treasures. Easier said than done. The more I struggle to gently pull one out, the worse they get. I keep going for a while, keeping my cool and patience. Then I lost it and start to irrationally pull and yank using inappropriate Christmas verbiage.

It’s getting worse. Time to take a deep breath, this is only a small pack of hangers. They can’t possible get the best of me. In that calm moment, an idea (a divine inspiration?) comes to me. I just pick up the tangled mess with 2 fingers and gently shake it. Poof…. 5 hangers fell easily on the counter, ready to be used. Yeah… could it be that easy? I did again… same results. I was able to un-tangled the entire pack in less than 5 minutes. No frustrations, no temper loss.

Sometimes the solution to our problem is a lot easier than we make it to be. It’s all too easy to get stuck on a mindset that “this is the right way, the logical way to accomplish the desired results”. But sometimes, thinking outside of the box we can get much better said results. Don’t close your mind to simple opportunities.

Be smart, stay safe.