Recalculating

I don’t know about you, but I tend to struggle with anxiety and unnecessary worry and stress in my day to day life. If something happens that I perceive to be an inconvenience or that someone has wronged me, my immediate reaction is to get annoyed, maybe tell my friends about and complain and have them agree with me that I was wronged, tell me I’m allowed to be pissed off, amping me up more, and then I’ll wallow in this grumpiness for the next few hours or days (off and on). And for what? All of that does nothing positive for me and my mental health, it just creates an air of irritability and crabbiness which isn’t good for anyone.

Something happened to me recently to bring all this to light: I now have a class at 10AM and the bus only runs every hour to the company, so I get there basically an hour early. The other day was my first day going there. I got off at the wrong bus stop (but it was okay because I’m out here so early), so I walked to the office through this neighborhood called Noceto and it was lovely! The weather wasn’t too cold and I got to see a new neighborhood. Then I came to the cafe next to the company I teach at and had un cafe e un brioche pistacchio, watched the Italian news, and honestly had a really great morning. However, the days leading up to this morning I was grumbling about the entire ordeal, pissed that I had to wake up an hour earlier than “needed” to get to this office way early— but it ended up being a good thing with a nice walk and a good breakfast. I realized how silly it was to be up in arms about missing an hour of sleep. I’m in Italy, I should be exploring new towns and cities as much as possible— if anything, I should be thankful that this new course I teach brought me to a town I never would have found otherwise! Instead of prematurely judging the experience before actually experiencing it, I could have spent the days leading up to this day being perfectly content. I’ve been working on this behavior, but it reared its ugly head last week and reminded me whose teachings most inspire me to think about these minor inconveniences in another way.

There is a psychotherapist named Sylvia Boorstein and I’m absolutely in love with her teachings, books, talks, etc. One talk in particular, from a podcast I love so much (On Being with Krista Tippett), always helps me calm down, get grounded, and get through moments that challenge me in a more constructive way. The talk (called What We Nurture) between Krista and Sylvia is now over 5 years old, but I still love it today. If you're interested in hearing what on earth I'm talking about, give it a listen. The two women talk about raising children, becoming wise, and managing worry, and I think the most important for this topic is when Sylvia says,

"I was thinking about the GPS in my car. It never gets annoyed at me. If I make a mistake, it says, “Recalculating”… [when] something happens, it challenges us and the challenge is, OK, so do you want to get mad now? You could get mad, you could go home, you could make some phone calls, you could tell a few people you can't believe what this person said or that person said. Indignation is tremendously seductive, you know, and to share with other people on the telephone and all that. So to not do it and to say, wait a minute, apropos of what you said before, wise effort to say to yourself, wait a minute, this is not the right road. Literally, this is not the right road. There's a fork in the road here. I could become indignant, I could flame up this flame of negativity or I could say, 'Recalculating.'"

I think allowing yourself the extra second or two to "recalculate" your emotions can do everyone a lot of good. It's not always easy, of course, but things that are worth doing usually aren't easy!

I'll end this post with my two other favorite quotes of Sylvia's from this talk. In the first, she's speaking about parenting, and wise parenting specifically, but I think her words can also be applied to spirituality in general; patience, self care, stress management, and many other things that we all need to practice to better ourselves and how we treat others. The second quote is a sort of mantra to say to yourself when you're feeling anxious and stressed out. I hope it brings you peace and well-being, and I'll see y'all next time.

"Spirituality doesn't look like sitting down and meditating. Spirituality looks like folding the towels in a sweet way and talking kindly to the people in the family even though you've had a long day... people often say to me, "I have so many things that take up my day. I don't have time to take up a spiritual practice." And the thing is [it] doesn't take extra time... You fold the towels in a sweet way. It doesn't take extra time."

"Sweetheart, you are in pain. Relax, take a breath, let's pay attention to what is happening, then we'll figure out what to do."

#thoughts #stressmanagement #selfcare #spirituality #patience