The last 3 days have been entertaining, to say the least. I feel like, every day, I notice something specific that is a weakness for me when it comes to being negative. On Friday, it was Road Rage.
I used to enjoy driving. I rarely used my horn. If someone cut me off, I would get annoyed for half a second and move on. This was all before I lived in New York. I'm surprised my horn still works. As I was driving home Friday evening, this guy cut me off...no wait...he coasted in front of me from the lane on my right over to the lane to my left. I immediately blurted out, "What the?! Nice, dude!" As I proceeded to inch up on the guy in front of me to prevent anyone else from pulling such stunts, I realized....something about this feels slightly negative. As I backed off and eventually let someone in front of me, I felt challenged to let go of the aggressiveness that was triggered by my commute. I challenged myself to let go of my agenda and the emotions that I so easily let take over when someone interferes with it. Ahhh, that was freeing. I actually quite enjoyed the rest of the drive home. That is, until I wanted to get off at my exit....I was about 1 mile from my exit and I could see traffic was stopped up and I eventually came to a halt. I sighed and started getting flustered thinking about how I should have taken the exit before and how I was going to be late getting to where I was going and on and on and on. Again I thought, " Wait a minute! No negativity. How can I turn this around?" I decided it was a good opportunity to listen to a worship CD I hadn't listened to in a while and quickly found myself worshiping and, once again, actually enjoying grid lock. (Typing that just now kind of threw me. "Enjoying grid-lock?!")
Saturday, I was crafting a shirt for the "Runnin' of the Green" with a friend of mine. I had pretty much finished the shirt and was very pleased with how it came out. I decided to go over the letters one last time to make them stand out. As I did, the unthinkable happened....a smudge!! Gasp! No!! I blurted out, "Oh no!! I can't believe I did that. That sucks!" I tried to fix it and continued to complain about it as I did it. I then caught myself and thought, "I'm being rather negative at the moment." Everything was going according to my plan and worked out very nicely and then I smudged the paint! How could I let that happen?!
How many times do "smudges" work their way into our lives? Our perfectly planned out lives. How do we respond? This painted a bigger picture for me than just what happened with the shirt. I started to think about all the times life throws me curve balls and how I have a choice (whether it feels like it in the moment or not) to let my emotions take over and respond out of fear, anxiety, and negativity or to take a minute to think about the bigger picture. The fact is, things don't always go according to OUR plans do they? But, more often than not, I look back and realize how trivial it was. Sometimes, things even work out better than we "planned" for them to. (You couldn't even see the smudge after it dried.) .... I feel like I could go on and on about the "smudge" metaphor, but I'll save that for another time.
This (above) is how I felt yesterday. (And am still feeling a bit of it today.) Yesterday was the "Runnin' of the Green" and it was SO much fun! I'm definitely doing it every year! Yesterday afternoon, I was so tired and run down and dehydrated. I was cranky and started to feel my positive mentality slip. I wanted to complain. (I think I started to at one point.) I was suddenly aware (I feel like I say that a lot...it HAS been happening a lot!) of the fact that, when I'm not necessarily 100%, I'm not as aware of myself and the way I act. It took me a lot longer to catch my mood slipping and my words that followed. Once I did, however, I once again had a choice. I could have sulked and complained and I would have been miserable to be around....let alone I would have made myself miserable. Instead, I chose to acknowledge the fact that I was tired and didn't feel well. I got some water and decided that I didn't want to spend the rest of my day like this. The rest of the day, in my opinion, turned out completely different than it would have had I chose to let the negativity take over. (As I would normally do.) I went to dinner, I had some good laughs, and got to bed early. It was a good day!
I'm now at the tail end of day 6. I'm getting ready to make the drive home and I like to think I will deal with the traffic a bit differently today.
Hope everyone had a great weekend!
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