It’s a Tuesday evening and you’re heading home from an exhausting, 9-hour work day, stuck in traffic, no doubt. Throughout the day, your work phone didn't fall silent for more than 5-minutes and your boss annoyed you to no end with the amount of favors he asked.
The driver of the car behind you lays on his horn for longer than necessary and starts screaming various curse words out the window, demanding that you fill in the empty space between you and the car ahead (which is approximately 3-feet, but you flick him off and move forward anyway). In your head, you go over what needs to be done tonight: go grocery shopping, walk the dog, take the kids to soccer practice and cook dinner, among other things. And boy, do you have a raging headache. Still stuck in the stop-and-go traffic, you rummage through your purse in search of the Advil when you suddenly have to slam on your breaks, which sends your purse flying, tossing everything in it onto the floor of the car.
Most people can closely relate to this kind of day. Today’s society is more pessimistic than ever before and has trained us to see the bad in situations instead of finding the good. Stress is a normal thing; it happens, and it happens often. However, if you let it rule your life, it then controls your everyday thought process, and that’s where it gets dangerous. Now try seeing the situation this way:
It’s a Tuesday evening, one day closer to Friday. You’re heading home from a 9-hour work day, where you just helped a lot of customers and became your boss’ favorite employee because you agreed to lighten his work load for the day. The traffic is stopped, and the guy behind you is honking vigorously, screaming for you to keep moving forward because his wife is in labor at the hospital. You move up as far as you can (anything to help him out of this traffic a bit faster). In your head, you start to go over what needs to be done tonight: you get to try out a new recipe, slip some exercise in with your dog and spend some quality time chatting with your kids on the way to soccer. You rummage through your purse and have to slam on the breaks, causing everything to tumble over, but upon scanning the messy car floor, you finally rediscover that ring that you’ve been missing for nearly a month!
This is about learning to be content with your existence and actually putting yourself in others’ shoes occasionally, because who wants to live a stress-filled life where all you want to do is pound your head against a wall? Just know that there are always other options, other possibilities, that may be in the present situation other than what you see on the surface. That man who was honking and yelling actually had a legitimate reason to, but we automatically assumed that he was just an impatient a-hole. This change in your thought process is going to take effort and time, but maybe you’ll make it to age 60 without dreading Tuesday drives home in the stopped highway traffic.
