Reacting mindfully to minor irritants

Crash!

These things happen when you're not looking, of course, and so they make an interesting test of mindfulness.

In this case the "crash" was the easiest of all to deal with - my computer's hard drive was wiped out. (If I could hear I would have heard this coming, but I don't wear hearing aids while sitting at the computer so I had not noticed that - as the repairman said - it was sounding like a cement mixer. )

All that was lost was my email of the past seven months and anything that I had written during that time, but not published any where. (Yes, I had a back-up hard drive, but the system had a problem, I had disconnected it last September and had not gotten around to fixing it, so I was in violation of my own basic rules of backing up things.)

So what's this have to do with mindfulness? Well, I didn't feel agitated. The loss of information was about yesterday,not today or tomorrow. Yes, that would change today - I would have to work at Bren's machine for a few days. And it would change tomorrow - I will be weeks building new bookmarks, email addresses, filing system, and downloading stuff from web sites I manage. So I immediately saw that as an opportunity for spring cleaning and reoanization.

The good thing is, these weren't conscious decisions. In retrospect I can say that it is entirely irrational to get upset at such events. Being upset serves absolutely no purpose. Just makes me disagreeable to be with - disagreeable to others and to myself. But I never gave it a thought until well after the fact. So while I feel the Iraq war stole some of my mindfulness edge and certainly slowed my progress, this event reassures me that I have learned something this year and I have managed to change my behavior in small, but useful ways through mindfulness.

This also fits in nicely with what I am reading now about non-violent communications where part of the emphasis is on understanding that you control your emotions, not outside events. It's all in how you choose to react.

OK, so it's small stuff. But it's good training ;-)

Posted by Greg Stone at April 23, 2003 04:31 PM