16 Jun Who do I want to be right now?
Let me paint the picture for you.
I’m in the airport, traveling home from a busy four days away. I’ve been traveling a lot in the last six months. The space I’m in is small. Not full to capacity, but busy.
I’m with a couple other people. We find seats, finally. Not all together because (okay, here comes my rant…) there’s a guy there spread out over four large seats, one for his feet, one to sit in and two spaces occupied with his stuff.
The seat with his feet is spread out into the aisle, which makes people almost trip going by him.
You get the picture?
And, I bet you can hear my annoyance.
At the same time, I watched how his physical space was occupying a HUGE amount of my psychological space.
I wanted to complain. Be snarky. I briefly thought about…oh all kinds of things.
But I knew that would only entrench my self-righteousness.
My fall back self-reflection at times like this is always, “Who do I want to be right now?”
There are times that are absolutely important to voice my protest. To speak out. To right a wrong. Yet I could feel the place inside me. Was this one of those times?
My experience has been that when I’m caught in this kind of internal energy, the external outcome only spirals into yuckiness. My practice has been to transform myself inside so that I can approach the outside with a different perspective.
Sometimes I hate having this practice.
Yet, it’s served me well over these many years.
In the ancient wisdom traditions, from Marcus Aurelius’ writings to Buddhist texts, there are invitations to use what comes up in life, those annoying obstacles, as means to build character, develop virtues, and transform ourselves.
So, I sighed. This has been my path for close to forty years. The choice was clear.
What did I want to do? More importantly, who did I want to be right now?
Do I want to be this snarky, bitter, cranky, annoyed being?
Or can I take this “obstacle in the path” as a way where I get stuck, trapped in my own negative internal cycles, seeing what’s wrong.
Might this be an opportunity to let go of the small irritations? Is this what I wanted to “waste” my precious energy on right now?
Ugh.
I got up to go to the bathroom as a chance to change my perspective – and my energy. When I got back I sat in a different seat where I didn’t see him.
Sometimes the hardest meditations are the ones where I am pulling the elephant of my own mind out of the gutter. This way, I point my mind and body in a different direction. Look over here. Ease the fixation.
I’m still not done with this meditation. I might never be.
The benefit in this moment was having a sense of compassion for myself, for having these annoyances, for being travel weary, for letting someone take riled space in my mind.
That perspective softened me. Allowed me to have some compassion for someone like this person who needed to take up such physical space. I have no idea what his psychological situation is – and really, this isn’t about him. I can’t change him, fix him, or perhaps even impact him.
In this moment, there’s only me and the opportunity to make a small shift in me.
This is an incomplete example. Nothing big happened in me. And certainly nothing happened “out there.”
What did happen was I felt greater ease, equilibrium and a sense of being aligned with my heart, my values, what is important to me.
That’s the benefit of practicing anything that changes the body, mind and heart. We unhook from what’s wrong out there to look at what can we shift inside ourselves so that we can be with what’s wrong out there in a different way.