Boggle Lessons

I just have to say it. I love words. Perhaps it’s because as a kid I spent endless hours shaking up those alphabet cubes, jiggling them into a plastic grid, and then racing against time…and my mom…hunting for words. Recently, most of my kids have discovered the joys of one of my favorite games. As we gathered around the kitchen table, time slipping away with each grain of sand, pencils scribbling barely legible words as fast as we could, we also stumbled across some very serious life lessons in the midst of our fun.

We were going over our lists of words, and one my daughters had a short list. She was quite upset by it, as she realized it meant that she was definitely out of the winner’s bracket. A short list in and of itself happens to all of us at some point, but what she said had me jump out of my chair to grab an extra piece of scrap paper, just so I wouldn’t forget to write this post. And what did she say?

“I was so distracted by what I thought should be there, I missed what was actually there.”

Wow! How often do we do that in life? How often do we miss opportunities because they don’t look the way we expected them to? How often do we get stuck in nasty cycles of endless complaining (so easy to do!!) and miss something positive that we could be thankful for? How often do we miss seeing the blessings in our lives (which we ALL have!) because we’re distracted by something else we think we should have? How often do we spend time spinning in endless circles and getting frustrated because we’re too busy comparing ourselves to someone else or the things we can’t do when we should be focusing on the things we can do?

The thing is, during that game, there were TONS of words. She was so upset because when the time was up, she saw how long everyone else’s lists were, and knew immediately she had zero chance of winning. The words were in the grid, she was just focusing on the wrong things! Her mind kept spinning around in circles of its own expectations and totally missed opportunity after opportunity. Losing focus can be devastating. But focusing on the wrong things can be destructive. Both can promote negativity and create wedges as well as self-imposed growth obstacles.

In life, let’s not lose focus or focus on the wrong things. Let’s choose to focus on the positive (yes, it can be hard!) and on things we can be thankful for and look for ways we can invest into things that matter in the long run, such as relationships. Instead of comparing ourselves to others, we can have confidence in what makes us unique and take steps to be the best version of ourselves that we can be. Let’s keep our focus and see how long our life list of positivity, growth, and success gets!