Photo by mdemon via Flickr, used under the Creative Commons License.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So while yesterday my partner and I spent a marvelous day on a coastal Maine beach and then enjoyed fish tacos, it makes sense that today I am holed up in my office whittling away at my to-do list. That does not mean that I am happy about it. In fact, I am rather grumpy about being in the office. I have tried to remind myself that, in reality, I should simply be grateful that I had the opportunity to spend time at a beach yesterday – so many cannot. I should also be happy that I have a to-do list and an office within which I can work on that list. Easier said than done. I am reminded of something that I read a while back. When one has a headache, instead of dwelling in the pain and discomfort, see it as an opportunity to be grateful for having a head in which to experience an ache, and to enlarge one’s focus to the entire head holding the ache. Maybe then I too have an opportunity to focus on the day holding this grumpiness, not on the grumpiness itself. It does help actually. Suddenly my irritability becomes a small part of my big day, a day which is still mostly unwritten. As my grumpiness shrinks, I am reminded that the attitude with which I am approaching my tasks is simply that – an attitude. While it is true that by feeling grumpy, I can better understand and appreciate its opposite – happiness and gratitude – it is also true that I can change my attitude whenever I choose. While wallowing in negative emotions has a certain stickiness factor, it is not an insurmountable task to let these negative emotions go. Sometimes, to do this, I focus on the emotion (anger, irritability, etc.) and then take a deep breath, purse my lips and blow this anger/irritability/etc. out. Let it go, literally and figuratively. By now, after writing all of this, my grumpiness is truly a withered feeling in the past part of this day.
Funny how, now that I am feeling more contented, my day seems filled with many more possibilities. Maybe I can finish early and take a walk in the woods, spend some time on the back porch… Who knows? So in the end my grumpiness is held within my much bigger day, just as a headache happens in a much bigger head, and we are each so much bigger than our discrete challenges.
