Recently, I broke the bottom part of my glass butter dish, while the lid stayed intact. Both, broken bottom and useless top, or so I thought, went into the recycling bin. Then I went online to see where I could find a similar dish to replace it. Lo and behold, what I thought was the lid was actually meant as the bottom portion, and what I broke was supposed to be the lid. I had been stuck in my thinking. If I had thought out of the box, I could have saved the lid, and kept using it as the legitimate bottom part it was actually meant to be. Instead my mind had tagged the unbroken part as unusable because I had labeled it lid. Of course in my defense I could have said that my application was creative too, just to make me feel better. As a matter of fact, and in hindsight, I guess the butter dish could be used either way around.

But the creative beauty would have been in seeing right away that the dish can work either way, my choice, my preference. This incident taught me to look more deeply, to slow down before acting spontaneously (the throwing out part), and to be more creative and less rigid in my approach.

Has something like this ever happened to you?