mildly melodramatic (who, me?!)
I walked into work on Tuesday with the new black ink cartridge in hand. I had been waiting for what seemed like an eternity to finally get hold of the right cartridge for the printer at work and finally be able to print out a number of documents.
I opened the little front door and awaited the printer to obediently make some little mechanical noises. But nothing happened. I looked at the little screen on the front of the printer. No words. No lights.
Oh great, I thought. It is freaking broken. Of course it is. I kept cursing inwardly, wondering why, oh why, did this have to be so difficult? I sat down on the floor in front of the printer and pulled it out from its little cave beneath the desk. Crawling amidst forgotten tangles of cords that lead from this to that, I began to carefully attempt tracing the cords from the back of the printer, taking into consideration that perhaps the machine had come unplugged.
It was like a cornfield maze, not knowing what cord went to what and a number of them just simply disappearing off behind trails of more cords. It was tedious and starting to hurt my knees, kneeling in exploration like that. I pulled the printer off of my lap and kept myself from slamming it back onto its little stand.
I stared at its blank expression. Then I saw the one thing I had not taken into consideration – the POWER button. Power button pressed, a hum of recognition from the printer, and the piece that holds the ink cartridges shot over to the right. I put the new cartridge in, closed the front door and allowed the printer to align itself.
I suppose perhaps I make things a little more complicated than they need to be. Perhaps I have a tendency for the overdramatic.
How many times have you misunderstood the words someone says to you and reacted immediately to your misunderstanding? I can’t even count how many times I’ve read an email too fast on my Blackberry while eating lunch and completely misread what was being said. Lunch would be ruined as I sat and stewed in anger at the message. By the time I get to my laptop to re-read and prepare a response, I would see that I had missed the point entirely and that the whole email was actually a compliment or a thank-you or something sweet.
Many meditative teachings say that we choose how we react. If we take that extra second to step back and feel out the situation, ask ourselves why we’re feeling the way we’re feeling, experience the sensation of the emotion, and THEN react, we’re more likely to act in a mindful way (aka, avoid calling someone an a-hole or throwing something across the room in blind rage).
But that’s really part two.
Before you experience the reaction of your own heart, you have to take in what is going on around you. You don’t want to spend your time over-reacting, let alone over-reacting to something that didn’t even actually happen.
All I’m saying is the whole world isn’t against you. And when you take a moment to realize that, you’ll see that a lot of reactions you have are defensive. I felt like the printer wasn’t working and that it wasn’t working because someone else had broken it and not taken the time to fix it. I immediately assumed that I would end up having to spend the remainder of my workday trying to fix it and it would take away from everything else on my to-do list I had yet to get to-done.
It sounds silly, but think back to the times when you’ve overreacted. Could you have brought a new level of compassion to the situation – not only on your own behalf, but toward the rest of the world?
All the details are ready to be set into motion. It’s just a matter of turning on your sense of acknowledgement to the things that are going on around you and your participation in the present.