Perspective, anyone?

Ever have one of those days? Let me tell you about mine today. I’m not the most competent person to be let loose on a simple electrical device and its attendant bag full of wires. In this case it was a Sony camcorder. Soon after I bought the thing I lost the instruction manual [my wife told me at the time that act represented a modified death wish, but that seems a little extreme]. Anyway, losing it didn’t help.

Then, although I somehow managed to charge the battery of the thing some weeks ago, naturally it ran out of juice – and now I can’t figure out how to connect any of these wires to anything like an electrical outlet and recharge it. And I need the camcorder because, as a [would-be] paid professional public speaker, I want to submit an application, which must include a video clip, for a paid speaking gig, and tomorrow’s the deadline. Well, I’ve stopped trying to charge the thing, at least for the time being: the more I try the more it seems I can’t do it. The image that springs unbidden to mind is of me dissolving my Sony HDR-PJ200 into a puddle on the floor like some unwitting Dorothy dousing the Wicket Witch of the West with a bucket of water. Yes, one of those days…

Then we got a phone call. It seems a friend of ours with rectal cancer is on what looks like the losing end of a regimen of radiation and then chemotherapy. And then her daughter learns, within the same week, that [a] she’s 5 weeks pregnant, and [b] her husband has liver cancer. Inoperable liver cancer. And I thought my camcorder problem was huge!

Somehow I’m reminded of the following incidents from Lincoln’s life. A friend once reported finding Lincoln sitting in his chair so collapsed and weary that he did not look up or speak when he addressed him. Lincoln put out his hand mechanically as if to shake hands when the friend told him he had come at Lincoln’s bidding. It was several minutes before Lincoln was roused enough to say that he 'had had a hard day.’
We all need a little perspective, don’t we?