07/21/2021
After a very patient-year of living with the pandemic, you would think that I would have learned a little more patience, acceptance, and tolerance. It turns out that those are very hard habits to break. When things don't go our way, we have a tendency to want to find someone or something to blame. When someone else gets something that you want, it's easy to think it's not fair. Whether it is business success, the last piece of dessert at a restaurant, a new car, a flat tire, or just things not working out the way we had hoped, we look for a reason, someone responsible. Sometimes we even blame ourselves.
But in many cases, there is no one to blame. Perhaps too many cases. Things that are seemingly easy to attribute blame to, for example not getting a promotion, are often just matters of chance, timing, or a random series of events. Sometimes your number comes up, sometimes it doesn't. I am not making the case that we don't have agency, we often do. What I am suggesting is that we think we have more control than we do. And more importantly, we often think we have control where we do not and forget we have control where we do.
My entry point for changing my narrative is asking myself the question "how long do I want to be upset about this?" Turns out, most of the time it is another 15 minutes but eventually, I turn my story narrative around and asked myself "what can I learn from this experience?"
Having already exhausted the possible entities to blame, one thing I learn daily or perhaps was reminded of was that sometimes there is no one to blame. You are just dealt the hand you have, and it just is.
A little fatalist, and yet just because you are not a fatalist, doesn't mean that you can control something. You can however change the way you react to it. Life becomes much simpler that way. Or for me at least it does.
