I got annoyed this morning when there was a bottleneck in the bag drop line.
The line was for everyone together, (i.e. frequent travelers and novice weekenders) and the process was not functioning at maximum efficiency.
I like efficiency.
As a frequent traveler, I can move through bag check and security as smoothly as a pea going up an unsupervised toddler’s nose.
So, when things get held up for a reason that doesn’t make any sense to me, I get a little salty.
As I was creating wrinkles around my mouth by scowling, I remembered a point from the book I just started reading. (The Power of Now by Eckard Tolle)
There is no good, there is no bad.
Things become good or bad based on the meaning we assign to them.
Traffic isn’t bad until we assign meaning to it. It’s just a lot of cars in one place. It’s my need for speed, forward momentum and wanting everyone to get out of my way that creates the negativity in my experience of traffic. (If I don’t want to get somewhere, traffic becomes good.)
Comments aren’t bad until we assign meaning to them. It’s our interpretation of the mother-in-law saying, “I never thought you’d be such a good mother.” that makes it good (She thinks I’m a good mother) or bad (She had a really low opinion of me.) Until I assign meaning, it’s just words. Same with things written in e-mail or text.
The little kid kicking the seat next to me endlessly is just movement until I assign meaning. My need for silence, still and peace makes the kicking “bad”.
The lady with the weird red hair writing about your seat-kicking kid is just someone writing until you assign the meaning that she’s judging you for being a bad parent when you’re just doing the best that you can.
The Turnaround
As I walked away from the slow Delta bag check line, I caught myself being pissy and had a little internal coach/player conversation. They were both in cardigans. For some reason all my inner voices wear cardigans. (*shrug*)
The Coach asked, “Why are you being this way?”
And I replied, “Because it was inefficient and bad. It shouldn’t be that way.”
“Ok, but it IS the way it is. That’s the reality. Why are you letting it ruin your morning? You being pissy isn’t going to change anything other than spoiling your perfectly happy morning mood. You have plenty of time, you’re not in a rush, you actually got through the line pretty quickly, and it’s behind you now. Why are you being a miserable cow?”
(My inner coach isn’t always polite…but that’s only the societal meaning I put on that particular name…a cow with an infected udder (aka, miserable) probably acts similar to how I was acting in that moment…so there’s that!)
And I had to admit, the inner coach was right. Just because the bag check line wasn’t the way I usually see it, it was the unchangeable reality. The line wasn’t “bad” until I compared it to past experience and judged it inefficient…when in reality, it was different and it was just fine.
(and frankly, it was probably that way because some intelligent Delta agent was solving a problem based on that day’s circumstances…What if we assumed THAT??!! A topic for another e-mail!)
Think about this next time something annoys you.
I see flight attendants doing this all the time. They have to deal with a special request, a passenger complaint or the same question for the 746th time. I see it and think ‘that must be so annoying’ but with most of them, you can see that they have the mindset of “this is what I’m here for, and this is just another task I need to complete.” Not good or bad!
We have the choice in what meaning we assign to things, and that impacts how we experience life.
Our annoyance, exasperation or whatever other bad feelings we are having doesn’t change the reality. The report needs to get done, traffic will happen, and people will unintentionally say things that can be interpreted in certain ways that don’t feel good.
And you have the choice of what meaning you’re going to assign to things, and thus how you’re going to feel about them.
Think about THAT!
And go get ‘em Tiger.
