Wouldn’t that be nice?
To just be able to undisturb myself...
in the moment...
all the time?
What would the world look like if we were all able and willing to do that?
I will admit, I get disturbed. Sometimes it is over little things...traffic, things being out of order at home, my children’s socks somehow always ending up in a plant, paying someone to clean my car and then having it still be dirty. I will fully admit that some of the above has caused great disturbance. Kind of ridiculous what I will give my serenity away for...
I seem to handle the bigger things better...death, loss of a friendship, financial issues, breakups, these things also greatly disturb me but the larger things seem to be less emotionally disturbing. Maybe this is perhaps because I kind of feel like a great part of any of the above is completely out of my control.
I will admit that I allow myself to get all bent out of shape about some pretty trivial things while not allowing myself to feel much of anything about some larger, more important issues. Why the disconnect?
I think, for me, it is easier to feel the little things. The larger things feel overwhelming with their looming beginning and endings. Not so finite. Larger in every sense of the word. Seems that I come at these larger emotional payloads with a wariness that is absent with the day to day trivial stuff. I think on some level I am worried that if I give too much emotional energy to these larger items, they might overtake me and perhaps I will lose my way back. While the smaller things seem safer to blow out of proportion. Get super upset over the dirty floor mats in the otherwise clean car...this is somehow safer even though it makes me look like a crazy person in the moment.
Maybe this imbalance in attached emotionality is what perpetuates the instability. Perhaps at one time in my life it was unsafe to feel and show emotion about the larger things, so it had to come out somewhere. So flipping out about something relatively small became the proving ground for emotional expression.
The older I get the more I feel emotionally stable. This is not to say that I do not still lose my shit over relatively ridiculous shit...that would be false. However, I do feel that I am getting better at seeing myself and my emotions as integrated. I have more access to them now. I am not as afraid of them as I used to be. No longer only chasing the good emotional highs and avoiding the lows like people attempt to avoid a cold at the holidays.
I will say that aging has a wonderful natural ability to level one out emotionally. Advancing age also has the real life experience of placing our lives into proper perspective. We have less energy to sweat the small stuff. However, I will also claim a little progress here all by myself. I have really worked at looking at my deficiencies. I have worked hard to inventory myself and the places I need work. I have become willing to see my own ridiculousness and instead of defending it or railing against it, I have been willing to work with it, acknowledge it, hell, even laugh my ass off at it. Seriously, sometimes, I am so out there that even I find myself funny.
What has resulted is a deeper friendliness with myself. I am not taking myself so damn serious all the time which allows me a greater perspective on me, which then allows me to lighten the fuck up. Pretty cool how that works.
Before I communicate major spiritual evolution here, I will completely own that just 10 minutes ago at 3:40 am, threw a little mini fit over the fact that my stupid Ember mug wouldn’t heat my coffee to the proper 135 degree temperature. This is an ongoing frustration for me...the technology is great but sporadic in its consistency which I find frustrating and annoying.
When I am present though, like this morning, I am capable of seeing that I am behaving childish or immaturely while I am still acting in that manner. Most of the time, I just laugh at my head. Shake my head and calm the fuck down. I think “wouldn’t it be so great if I wasn’t wound so tightly?” Then I laugh because we all know that is not ever going to happen!
But somehow this process allows for me to be open to myself as myself and see where I am still struggling. A great deal more often with a niceness or acceptance that I was never previously able to muster. I can see I am disturbed while I am still disturb. This allows me immediate insight to myself which then allows for me to do something different...sometimes. There are moments in my everyday life where I can see that I am disturbed and can immediately undisturbed myself. Then there are those other days where an army could not right me. The progress coming in less moments requiring the militia and more moments where I see my own ludicrousness while I am being ludicrous.
The longer I am on the planet I really see that I have two choices in every moment: acceptance or disturbance. I cannot be disturbed and in acceptance at the same time, I cannot be disturbed and accepting at the same time. In everything I do, I get to choose. So if it is a choice, then why would I ever choose to be disturbed? I have a couple of reasons actually:
1. It is a habit. Sometimes I am just reacting because that is what I have always done. I am loving lately that I will find myself in the middle of a historic reaction and realize that is what I am doing and I can just stop. Realizing that if it is hysterical, it is historical. And I am done.
2. Sometimes it feels like the only way I can relate to the world about me. Everyone around me is disturbed and talking about it all the time. If I am not equally upset, I feel left out and alone. So I whip myself into an emotional frenzy just so that I can relate and have something to talk about.
3. Sometimes feeling badly feels good. Sometimes I need to feel disturbed to feel alive. Like if everything is just ok all the time that I am missing life. Acceptance is great and all but sometimes you just need to be all pissed off to be able to connect to the life force. Fucked up, I know, but...
Knowing why I chose disturbance over peace does help me spend more time in peace. I have avenues now to be able to exit my habitual patterns of behavior. I don’t think that I will ever get to a place where I will not chose to be disturbed...for some of the above reasons but also because of how much I learn from my disturbance. These frothy emotional benders are rich with information about who I am and who I am not.
Today I am grateful for the ability to see myself as honestly as I ever have been able to see me. I am sure deluded in ways that I have yet to fathom, but able to see me more clearly than ever before. A great personal evolution that I think will always begin and end with me noticing how much I freak out about things that are really not all that important. That somehow this willingness to go over the edge on these little things, keeps me from losing my shit on the larger more important issues in my life. Dysfunctional? Totally, but aren’t we all?
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