I don’t have a clue. Seriously, I don’t have the faintest. To me
life contains as much randomness as purpose. Shit happens as they say,
and anyone that says that you can control what happens in your life by only
having positive thoughts is lying. The bottom line is that there are too
many people, too many things going on for us to have complete control over our
lives. I don’t care how many affirmations you say every day or how kind
you are, shit will still happen. Someone you know will die, lose a job,
have a fight, get sick etc.
Early this morning I got a call from my eighty five year old neighbor who
lives alone. She had fallen on the street and wondered if I could take
her to the emergency care. “Of course” I replied. So I made a cup
of coffee while I got dressed and then left the house to get her.
After two hours at the emergency care, my neighbor was going to be taken to
X-ray, so I told her I was going to drive home and leave a key under my mat for
my brother-in-law who was coming to visit.
And so I did that. Ran home, pet my dog, had another cup of coffee,
left a key under the mat and got back in my car to drive back to Keiser when,
boom. A car rams into me. This girl, because she was in residential
Silver Lake didn’t think she needed to place
all her attention on her driving and was actually putting on her make up
while driving. Basically, she ran a stop sign.
My first thought was “why me?”. I’m already spending my Saturday
morning at a hospital and my week didn’t fare much better, so why do I get hit
while doing a good deed? For no simple reason or better yet for no reason
at all and that’s the point. Things in life will sometimes come out of
nowhere without discrimination of gender, social status, age or our score in
the goodness scale.
I may, right about now, be sounding really doom and gloom, but here is the good
news: “YOU CAN CHOOSE HOW TO PROCESS ALL OF IT”. I wrote that in caps because
it’s a big concept. We can choose how much we are going to let things
that we have no control over poison us with anger, frustration and
irritation. I’m not suggesting we should all drop our activities and
beliefs, and become enlightened people and not be bothered by anything –
although that would be certainly an achievement – but I’m suggesting we can
temper our reactions.
Let’s think about my car: the dent was already there and no amount of
anger towards the girl - who was now even more late for work than before
- would change that. Taking out my frustration on her only had the potential of escalating
things. So I took a minute to myself and breathed deeply a few times
before addressing this girl in a firm way. I got her information, waited for
the police to come and then went home.
Once home, I turned the music on and did some stretches on the floor to get
rid of the tension building up in my body. I again thought about what would
be the worst thing that could happen in this whole accident situation. The
answer was me having to cough up the deductible to have my car fixed, and while
no fun, it was not worth ruining my day over.
And then I thought of my neighbor who had said to the nurse that she was a
lucky person because her neighbor, meaning me, had the time and the care to
bring her to the hospital instead of saying how bad her life is without a
family, that she has to depend on a neighbor to take care of her.
So while I accept that there is plenty of randomness in this world I know
for a fact that how we deal with everything is completely up to each one of us
and in that there is no randomness.