All of us in life are thrown lemons! Some lemons are just more yellow, smelly, and apparent than others. So we know when those lemons come our way, or sometimes we think a lemon has come our way even if we didn’t think it was a lemon at all.

In my case, this last week threw me a lot of complicated lemons, and I had the chance to sit and learn about lemons that could be thrown any of our ways, and how we should train our minds and bodies to react. The typical response to lemons – sour, tart, astringent, acidic, sometimes bitter – is to pucker if you accidentally bite into one. Eventually, we learn not to bite into it, and to squeeze out the juice and make it into lemonade. In a nutshell, that was my last week.

A few lemons:

• Someone is bleeding uncontrollably from their arm or leg. What do you do? I learned how to get my hands a little bloody, find the wound, use a tourniquet, and temporarily stop the bleed so that less damage is done to the whole body.
• Someone has a chest wound, but you don’t know where it is. I learned how to feel for it, plug it temporarily with an adhesive pad, and hopefully save a life.
• You’re in the passenger seat in a car, and your driver just had a medical emergency. Now add that you’re blind and have never driven in your life, and no sane jurisdiction would give you a license to drive! I nonetheless learned how to put a car in neutral, apply the brakes, and eventually take the car from drive to park. (I learned a few more exciting things too, like cranking the gas in case the driver’s legs were shot but the driver could still steer, but everything I learned is a life skill anyone should have in case they’re thrown a really bitter lemon!)

And just when I thought, wow, what a week of knowing that I could be thrown a lot of lemons and survive to tell the tales, I had another unexpected Saturday. My day job can require periodic or longer-term travel. On work travel, I am regularly accompanied by an assistant. I was finishing up one trip and about to embark on the next in less than 24 hours of the first – leaving me just enough time to go home, unpack, do laundry, square away some life details, and get back on the road! And exactly 22 hours before my plane was to take off, another surprise lemon was tossed my way: the person scheduled to travel with me could no longer do so.  So while I should have been resetting my brain and rehearsing remarks to deliver over the next week, I now had to juggle a lot of unexpected extra tasks.

As someone with a disability, I’ve learned to plan meticulously. So I started thinking through Plans B, C, D, and E once I found out Plan A had just crumbled. I began reaching out to my networks of contacts, friends, and family to troubleshoot what I’d need and how to prioritize. I started pulling together the most crucial written information I needed from my assistant and putting it together electronically in the middle of packing. My sister started reaching out to her former students to see if they were available to stand in as subs while I was visiting their city.

Most importantly, I reconciled quickly in my head that this trip would not be as expected, and that everything on it would not be perfect – including me. I might miss a few beats, my clothes might not be perfectly pressed, my allotment of travel times from meeting to meeting might require healthy additions for contingencies, and my meeting notes might just have to be whatever I could remember at the end of my days since no note-taker would be along. My boss was her best self, reminding me I could do a lot of this in my sleep and that I didn’t even need “paper” – our lingo for the preparatory materials one would read before and reference during a meeting.

So, as I boarded my flight over this weekend, I reiterated in my head what I had learned and practiced the week before: when life throws us lemons, we can make lemonade – as long as we have the right mindset! Fingers crossed that my positive assumption about everything always working out in the end…somehow…will indeed win this week!

Tell me about a time you’ve made lemonade out of life’s lemons in the comments and on social media! I’d love to hear your stories. Talk to you all next week!