There's No Pouting in Greensboro

My book will haunt me until the day I die.

Life has always repeatedly handed me reasons to complain, except now there’s a fan of No Pouting in the Dojo two feet away, and she believes that I’m a super Pollyanna who doesn’t ever give in to whining.

Silly fan.

Life indeed still hands me lemons. It’s kinda a joke between me and The Universe now. And I try my best to make the best gosh-darn lemonade around, hard as it is sometimes. I’ve had a lot of practice in making lemonade. How do you make a great batch? I recently found a secret ingredient.

Latest lemonade-making opportunity: The Alabama Build-Vention. This annual charity build event in Greensboro, Ala., attracts martial artists from all over the United States and Canada. Participants each raised thousands of dollars and traveled hundreds of miles to perform manual labor tasks for citizens in this impoverished community who either can't afford to pay someone to help or who are too elderly or fragile in health to do it themselves. This year we scraped off decades-old paint from Main Street Greensboro, built out the interior of a new schoolhouse that will help residents earn their GEDs, and painted downtown buildings.

I was stoked to get started the next day, so my first night in town, I found an open spot on the floor of the Greensboro Baptist Church gym and pumped up my air mattress. Everything was going well. I was hydrated, fueled, and motivated to start work the next day. But after the lights went out, I realized that my brand new air mattress had a bad leak. Compounding that was a wicked case of insomnia, rare for this snore-a-holic. Compounding that was a growing anxiety every time a nearby city bell clock clang, reminding me that I was still awake. I tossed and turned on the air mattress, which by now had lost so much air that I began to feel the chilly gym floor beneath me. I was cold and annoyed. And then that dang clock bell would ring again. Just hours earlier I had admired the serenity of the bells. Now I cursed them.

Hours passed before I stubbornly decided that sleeping on the martial arts mats was a better option than sleeping on a cold, hard floor, so I dragged my blanket to the edge of green mats that my jiu jitsu colleagues rolled on earlier in the evening. But I still couldn’t sleep. And those dang bells still rang. And I realized that I’d start my first full work day in Greensboro tired. Frustration grew.

This was not what I expected to happen. This was unacceptable.

I started to panic. And then I remembered what our trusted leader, Tom Callos, said at our first group meeting: “This is a no-complaint zone. If we don’t have it, we don’t need it.”

Then my damn kung fu Sifu’s words wafted in: “Never expect. Never compare.”

Of course I had an expectation that I would sleep. I’m a good sleeper. I love naps and take them often. But I wasn’t sleeping. Sifu was right: I was upset because my expectation didn’t fit reality.

“So. O.K.,” I said to myself in a snotty tone, “if I don’t get sleep, I must not need it.”

And that was the moment that I fell asleep.

Seems that acceptance is a key ingredient in making a great batch of lemonade.

Hours later, as my fellow campers stirred, I felt strangely awake and energetic. A colleague took one look at my now completely flat air mattress and could only utter, “Oh, nooooo!”

And The Universe intervened, saying for me something that I wouldn’t have said for myself years ago: “That’s O.K. Last night’s bad sleep is insurance for tonight’s good sleep.”

The rest of the work trip was a sweaty, exhausting, paint-chip dirty, fantastic experience. And every night, like clockwork, my air mattress lost air. Whatever.

“My bad sleeps in Greensboro are insurance for sleeping great once I get home,” I began to say to myself.

I don’t think that I would have been in the correct mindset to see all the wonderful people and events if Callos hadn’t set the tone for the Build-Vention and if Sifu’s four words hadn’t settled into my psyche.

And if I hadn't added acceptance into the lemonade...