ANNOYANCES & CHOICES

It’s the little things that bug us. Like taking a car to my podiatrist and finding street construction in front of the building, so they can’t drop me off at the door. Or the cable tv keeps repeating the alert no signal until I reboot the box. Then there are the constant annoyances of computers and phones when things aren't working or momentarily freeze or go black and the only solution is to deinstall and reinstall or, like the cable box, reboot. We eventually discover these work-arounds and ultimate solutions to small irritations, but often not until we get riled up, react and unleash a torrent of expletives. In the midst of it, life feels unfair and abusive and way too much trouble to navigate.  

It’s also true with the big things that bug us. Our bad excuse for a president, for instance. Being forced to listen to his voice and see his repulsiveness daily on the news is bad enough, but it’s often too much as we worry about how his insanity and warped leadership are destroying the country and might affect our meager lifestyle. So I retreat into fictional fantasy and forego reality for a time. It’s a choice.

                                                     it’s breaking my heart

                                                     I can’t help it

                                                     it’s tearing my pieces away

                                                     to see you squirm

                                                     another poor worm

                                                     alive on the hook of today

One secret to life well lived is learning how to make good choices. A life is, after all, simply an accumulation of all our choices. Momentary choice is how we steer our lives. Most important are the choices that commit us to days, months, or even years - like relationships, career and work. Those choices are the hardest to make, the hardest to fail at, the hardest to keep, but often the most rewarding. 

Understanding ourselves and how much we can tolerate and/or revel in is often a lifelong learning curve. What is toxic to us or may not lead to a future can be elusive. A key to making the best choices is an awareness that every simple thing we choose to do represents how we want to live our life - a constant mindfullness, making the moments count.

I stopped smoking several times by replacing my sense of a self-who-smoked with a self who did not. I simply became a non-smoker in my deepest identity. Bad choices delay living well with a sense of purpose, like choices based on immediate gratification, addiction, or escape from necessary work. And how do we know what we need to be doing? When we can see and accept the way some choices take us off our path, go against our best self, as life becomes more of a pain and less of a pleasure. 

Other people, those we might see as lucky, who appear to have what we would like for ourselves, are often those who simply did not get trailed off. They chose a limited form of success over all other distractions, often later choosing more dire distractions when early interpretations of success failed to make them happy, like rock stars who fall into drug use, budding artists who waver and try to find fulfillment in inappropriate relationships or cling to new-found religion or faulty belief systems.

It's rare to know what will truly make us happy. Trial and error, satisfaction and disappointment, yes and no. Getting trailed off is the risk. But, with a little work it is always possible to discover how we might best fit into this insane reality where we hope to discover purpose and some pleasure.

Fighting our own demons is the greatest challenge of all. They whisper in our ears that we are not good enough, will never be good enough. It's as close to ‘the devil talkin' as anything. It is the dragon inside, formed out of whatever trauma and hurt we carry around. At some point the cognitive dissonance that keeps trying to bring us down can be turned off, like a faucet, when we look into the dragon's face and see it for what it is - a part of ourselves that simply needs to be loved and accepted as an aspect of all human frailty.

Dragon Pillow