I’ve started my morning like most – waking up too late and too lazy to exercise. Fed the cat, fed the Matt. Drank my coffee, edited some of my writing – mostly last night’s post. There’s more I want to say on it, but I’m intentionally holding back. I tried to think about what I’d like to write about today. I read a snippet from a book that I had copied down months ago – it was about understanding family origins as a path towards understanding each other – not in the mood to go there today. I decided, I might try to be a bit productive and pay bills, or at least check on some of my bills – I try to automate as much of that as I can, but some I still handle manually, and the move was disruptive. This is where the impatience comes in.
I have an older laptop (maybe 4 or 5 years). I went to open the spreadsheet that has some of my passwords – my memory for these things is crap, and I generate passwords based on random stuff I see – corkscrew687$, shoelace19*, squirrelwithfluffycheeks#6721 etc. I need a place to keep track of these things. I watched the clock as I tried to first open the folder and then the spreadsheet – the process took just over 4 minutes before I gave up. Certainly, not a lifetime, but as I sat there and listened to my computer hum away as it tried to do these tasks, I could feel myself getting aggravated. I did not want to spend my time waiting for such an easy task – watching that stupid spinning circle. I mean, how hard is it to open a document? I started to think, this is a shitty way to start the day – getting worked up over something so stupid…. maybe revisiting yesterday’s post put me in a bad frame of mind…. this got me to thinking about how we stack these things on top of each other (unintentionally). I decided to pause. I decided to move away from the spreadsheet (that still hadn’t opened when I started this post). This became my meditation. Why was this simple task turning out to be so frustrating?
For one, my time is limited in the morning, and I hate feeling rushed. Over the years, I’ve come to cherish some of my time (I still waste a lot of it, but that is by choice). Not that my time is so valuable that I can’t spare a few minutes, but I don’t want to waste it waiting on a document to open, I want the choice. As I listened to the computer struggle – the fan whir louder, I’m reminded that I’ll probably need to get a new one soon. This is it’s own frustration. I don’t use my computer for anything other than very basic tasks, word, excel, web, photos. It seems like it should be able to handle those things indefinitely. Things break down, they gradually decay. Who wants to be reminded of that at 7:30 in the morning, isn’t getting up enough of a reminder? (That’s me trying to interject some humor – David Sedaris, I am not). As I’m thinking about this, I’m also realizing part of my frustration is over being frustrated. Why do I even let it get to me. A more gentle approach would be to patiently wait for my computer to do its thing, maybe whisper sweet words of encouragement to it…. come on girl, you got this, you can do it, I believe in you. Or maybe I just sit there calm and observant.
Life is full of petty frustrations. I’m not above letting them get to me. But what does this do for the rest of my day? Will I be short with the person who is in my way (see This Is Water)? Will I continue to build a small monument to frustration out of the mis-shaped and wobbly bricks of small, annoying experiences? I’m not always a fan of mindfulness – at least not when it comes to the big things in life (I feel like it makes it too easy to walk away from real challenges that need to be dealt with), but in this case, I can see the benefit of mindfulness. I have the ability to recognize my frustration, call it out, change my course (or at the very least, meditate on it and blow it up in a post).
One of the things that I like about both writing and reading is that it takes time, it slows you down. You cannot move faster than you can read or write the words. We have so many thoughts crossing our brains, that it’s hard to hear all the notes in the noise. Writing forces you to slow it all down, pick a few threads, look at them, feel them, see and hear them. I’ve said several times on this blog, part of the purpose is to regain some of my attention… impatience is sometimes the result of lack of attention, the desire to flit from one thing to the next. Even as I write, I’m tempted to switch back to that tab with the credit card sign in, to check social media, to get on with things. When that urge becomes too great… I’ll have to give in. For now, I’m going to intentionally take a minute to re-read, then grab more coffee, and do nothing – break away from stupidly frustrating experiences, because it is not how I choose to start my day. Later, I’ll re-read some more, look at the rambling mess that I’ve written here, try to clean it up a bit. Maybe I’ll even get that bill paid.