patience
I've been thinking a lot about patience and . . . how to put it . . . how one looks at the world. I've a coworker who is just a few years younger than me, but often seems far younger in terms of outlook and, well, patience.
The contrast makes me think of how I engineered the attitude and outlook I hold now. What does it really take to learn that situations that inconvenience you personally aren't personal attacks? That viewing the world in the negative often means you see far less of the positive? And finally, that the surface of a problem is not the problem. There's so much lying beneath the surface, even in the simplest of situations.
I can remember when I was pretty similar to this. For an example, I could understand that someone else's mistake was a mistake and not an effort to ruin my day or make my life difficult, but I didn't much act like I understood it. With this point of view, a driver failing to signal before turning is clearly trying to murder me. I mean, what the fuck.
I know another person to whom a simple request to quiet down or change subjects is a personal attack along the lines of "hey, so could you maybe stop having fun forever and maybe drop dead while you're at it?"
It just seems so alien to me now. So much easier to accept that accidents and miscalculations happen, and to come up with a new plan. Simpler to accept a moment of disappointment in order to more quickly get back to happier times. I don't know. It just seems almost insupportable. I don't even know how to live that way anymore.
The contrast makes me think of how I engineered the attitude and outlook I hold now. What does it really take to learn that situations that inconvenience you personally aren't personal attacks? That viewing the world in the negative often means you see far less of the positive? And finally, that the surface of a problem is not the problem. There's so much lying beneath the surface, even in the simplest of situations.
I can remember when I was pretty similar to this. For an example, I could understand that someone else's mistake was a mistake and not an effort to ruin my day or make my life difficult, but I didn't much act like I understood it. With this point of view, a driver failing to signal before turning is clearly trying to murder me. I mean, what the fuck.
I know another person to whom a simple request to quiet down or change subjects is a personal attack along the lines of "hey, so could you maybe stop having fun forever and maybe drop dead while you're at it?"
It just seems so alien to me now. So much easier to accept that accidents and miscalculations happen, and to come up with a new plan. Simpler to accept a moment of disappointment in order to more quickly get back to happier times. I don't know. It just seems almost insupportable. I don't even know how to live that way anymore.