I love the commercials about how life comes at you fast. People say to take it one day at a time, but then several days may gang up on me at once! How do you handle it, the way life comes at you? Do you get caught up in it, like becoming entangled in the overhanging vine tendrils in a jungle? Does every problem (the broken dishwasher, the irate driver in back of you, the relative's phone call, the temper tantrum) seem to demand a big response from you?
Do you realize there's an alternative? It's very true that problems are mandatory in this life and it's equally true that the upset is optional. You don't have to have a (big) reaction. There is some gap in time between the phenomenon and the reaction. My challenge is to widen that gap sufficiently so that the reaction doesn't follow automatically, that I have a space there to design a response, that I can choose to blow up or, in the alternative, just shrug it off. I can choose what my response will be!
7,500 steps/162 lbs
Everything has been figured out except how to live. - Jean Paul Sartre
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