Today was a “bad day”. I’m always careful to keep that thought in perspective… nobody died, fell seriously ill or had a personal tragedy. But it was one of those days where things just went wrong instead of right. As I ruminated this evening I found myself keeping a list of everything that was wrong with the day:

• fire after fire needing to be put out at work, consuming most of my day
• multiple angry clients taking out their frustration
• wife and daughter both out of sorts
• bank putting needlessly paranoid security freeze on our credit card and not removing it upon request
• multiple frustrating personal technology failures
• a seemingly simple work task taken on in the evening turning into a major headache
• my plan to start (and hopefully finish) my taxes this evening snarled by my accountant’s website being down

There’s more, but I’ll spare you. I can already hear the tiny violin playing between your fingers.

But as if this wasn’t bad enough, here I was piling it on by listing everything wrong I could think of over and over in my mental chatter. Obviously not a constructive mental activity, and a good example of clinging to suffering.

A brief exchange on Twitter with a fellow #OMCru member really helped me turn it around with a wonderful “turning word”:

@InvitingTheBell: Having one of those days where so little has gone right that I just have to laugh.

@InvitingTheBell: Tried to post that last tweet from my Nook Reader – browser crashed. Tried to post it from my phone, battery died. That kind of day.

@HabituatedBuddh: @InvitingTheBell On the plus side, you had a 3rd posting option… that’s kinda something

Thank you for that, @HabituatedBuddh.