In the pack I run with, I am known for being a magnificently coordinated man.

Actually, that’s not completely true.

If I was known for any attribute pertaining to my motor skills, I probably am more known for being “functionally coordinated”.

I’m not the sharpest tack in the knife drawer, but I do get around.

I get around.

I do alright.

Last night, I was presented with a new challenge.

We have a pedestal sink in our bathroom.  Last night, on one edge of the sink sat my son’s large plastic tugboat.

On the other side, the side closest to the bathtub, there was a neti pot.  That’s pretty weird.  You use a neti pot to irrigate your skull.  Look it up…it’s the truth….but I digress. I can’t get hung up on what a weird thing it is to force water through your sinus cavities. I can’t go there…I have other things to do.

Anyway, there was stuff up on the sink that I wasn’t used to being there.

In retrospect, it was like a lot of things in my life that I could easily fix.  I could have moved either one pretty easily.  I could adapt my environment to suit my needs.

But I needed a drink of water right now.

The angle was wrong, but I positioned myself near the tub, craned my neck around, put my disoriented lips under an unfamiliar flow…and drank.

Water ran down my cheek in an unusual pattern, I gasped for air…getting only a partial drink where usually I’m pretty efficient.

It was water from the wrong side that was screwing me up.

It was my environment…it had nothing to do with my physical ability.

When I stood up, I was thankful that the tugboat isn’t positioned there permanently.  It was a problem that could be fixed.

If I had to drink strange water everyday, I think I’d just go out of my mind.

It was like a really gentle, really benign… waterboarding.

It was pure torture to have to manipulate my body like that just to get a drink of water before I went to sleep.

I’ve heard people say that sometimes one of the steps towards entrepreneurial success is a move to a new location.

Apparently, it’s not necessarily the new place that presents increased opportunities…it’s that the person starting the venture looks at the situation with a fresh perspective.

They see opportunity where, in the place they lived before, they used to only see obstacles.

After my “water from the wrong side” debacle, I wondered if sometimes the new-found optimism might not be delivered to us by situations that force a new perspective on us.

Sometimes, we get caught up in something that we had no hand in orchestrating.

It could be something traumatic (like a toy on a pedestal sink)…or it could be something kind of minor.  It could be just about anything…but, whatever “it” is, it acts as a fulcrum to help us see new opportunities and new positive outcomes.

We change, we grow…we learn new ways of avoiding using a glass to get a drink of water.

Maybe, sometimes, it takes something like a neti pot to force guide our hand and make us look at things from a different angle.