The difference between good luck and bad luck is your perspective

On Monday, I spent the day in Yellowstone with some of my family from back East. It was a fun-filled day. We started in West Yellowstone and I was heading back to Billings that day so I left them at Tower Falls and headed home through the Lamar Valley and Cooke City, and over the Beartooth Highway.

Last night, My husband and I were heading out to our weekly Wednesday Open Studio session downtown when suddenly my brake peddle went all the way to the floor and did NOT stop my truck! I was able to steer out of traffic and put on the emergency brake. Then I was able to get it back in the garage (that took some fancy driving with no brakes!). Archie Cochrane Ford is going to get me in tomorrow to fix what we’ve already figured out is a broken brake line. Not a big repair.

However…I can’t stop thinking about how LUCKY and BLESSED I am that my brakes didn’t go out on the BEARTOOTH HIGHWAY!!!!!!!

If you’ve ever driven over the Beartooth Highway you know that I very likely would not be here typing this story into a post if they had. I would have been a story on the evening news leaving people to wonder if I’d been drunk or driving too fast when I missed a hairpin turn and went plummeting over one of those steep drops into the abyss.

Thank you, God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, all the angels in Heaven, and the Force for holding that brake line together until I got home, and then letting it break before I even got out on the road last night. I was about to head down Zimmerman Trail, which would be equally terrifying and potentially deadly with no brakes.

My knee-jerk reaction when my brakes went out was not good. I pretty well panicked. I then was tempted to bemoan my “bad luck” at having my brakes go out just one week before I have to drive to Bozeman to catch a plane to Alabama for my family reunion. That threatened to put a real wrench in my carefully laid plans that I made two months ago.

But then I realized that my brakes could have gone out on the Beartooth Highway. Or they could have gone out when I was halfway down the Zimmerman Trail. Either one of those scenarios very likely could have killed me.

As soon as I reframed my thinking around the incident, shifting from “it was bad luck” to “it was good luck,” a sense of calm and good fortune overtook me.

Quite often, the difference between “good luck” and “bad luck” is a just a matter of perspective.

Life is good and I am grateful.

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