Life's Homework Assignments

This week has been pretty interesting. Life definitely stepped it up and gave me a lot of “assignments” or “tests” this week. There were a lot of unpleasant scenarios where I had to choose how I wanted to deal with it – react out of anxiety, anger and fear, or act out of love. These were scenarios that required me to figure out a balance. I knew I didn’t want to get all angry, but I couldn’t “let it go” either. I had to deal with it. I had to address it in a balanced way.

For the sake of the people involved, even though this is fairly anonymous, I won’t go into details. This is not a gossip blog. I’ll try to address the big-picture issues, because what happened is still extremely important and could be useful to others. In fact, I KNOW it will be useful to others.

Scenario #1 deals with someone trying to give me help that I did not ask for, and had little time to respond to because I was so swamped at work. I ended up saying I was starting to get frustrated with them, and I asked them to please just do what we had agreed to. I had the impression they were mad at me after that, because they didn’t do what they’d planned on doing, and I hadn’t heard from them. Half-asleep from a busy day, I decided to sit down and at least write an e-mail, since I did not have the energy to call and ask what happened that same day. I wrote out how I understood how they might be mad at me, and took the time to explain the situation. I explained how busy I was, and wrote out all the details of the explanations that I did not have time to go into earlier. I apologized if I offended them and expressed that I really valued their help, and I knew they were not required to give me that help.

Turns out they had just fallen asleep.

Still, it was probably good of me to clarify why I was starting to seem frustrated. But by acting out of love instead of getting all angry and defensive, I avoided creating a problem that wasn’t there. I was proud of myself.

Scenario #2 deals with me feeling disrespected. I let it build up and got angry, but only snapped a tiny bit. I went home, tried to cool down and write out what I wanted to say to that person. I wanted to make sure it was not emotionally charged. I worked hard on wording it such that I simply made the points I needed to make and expressed how their words and behaviors made me feel, without assigning blame or insulting them. I knew wording it in a negative way would only further antagonize the problem. I couldn’t ignore this problem, but I couldn’t approach it from a place of negativity, either.

So today I sat down with the person. I first apologized for snapping at them, and said that I could have handled that better. I then read my speech (the person understands my need to write things out). I was so nervous. I didn’t know if it would still cause a fight. It didn’t! The person was grateful for what I said and how I said it. I had also made a suggestion as to how to avoid situations like the one that ticked me off, and they thought it was a great idea. The person even gave me some constructive criticism, which I accepted and promised to work on. It all worked out beautifully.

It is SO IMPORTANT to stop and cool down instead of reacting. Both of those situations this week could have blown up into huge disasters if I had decided to get angry and defensive. These situations really tested my will-power and my dedication to approaching life and problems with love. Most of the things I’ve been working on lately simply had to do with letting things go. Scenario #2 forced me to deal with a problem where I wasn’t allowed to get angry the way I was used to, and I wasn’t allowed to let it go, either. Those are the easy ways out, but they cause more problems down the line. I was forced to actually handle the problem in a mature manner. And I did it! People don’t fight you when they know you’re not attacking them.

What assignments has life been giving you? Did you approach those assignments with love?