It’s Not About You
I spend a lot of time on the road, traveling to lectures, workshops, readings, and conferences all along the mid-Atlantic coast. Unfortunately, this puts me side by side a lot of unhappy and rather short-tempered commuters who have little patience with drivers like me who take a more leisurely pace on the road. I watch the cars dart from left lane to right, right to center, center to left, then back to right as they jockey to and from the lane that, at the moment, is moving a mile or two faster or slower than the others. In the end, we always see each other again within a few cars this way or that. It never fails.
As they pass me, though, they shoot me glares of frustration, anger, and borderline rage. How could I be so slow, so stupid? They offer a few shouts about my Mother (may she rest in peace), and they then speed up to wait behind the car just ahead, one lane to the left, or to the right.
When we meet again a few miles ahead, I just smile, wave, and ease on by, disregarding their one-fingered gestures and red-faced rants.
One of the reasons why they are so upset is because they can’t control me or my emotions; they want to transfer their hate, their anger, their frustration to me, but I will not let them.
Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All people live in their own dream, in their own mind; they are in a completely different world from the one we live in. When we take something personally, we make the assumption that they know what is in our world, and we try to impose our world on their world.
There are several choices I have, of course. I can ignore them (which I do), and stay focused on my road, on my journey, and ignore the hatred and frustration that might be hurled my way. Another choice is to absorb that anger, make it personal, and retaliate by shouting more hatred — and more loudly — which will lead to further escalation.
To me, the choice is obvious. If I take it personally, nothing is resolved. If I accept that none of this is directed toward me or is about me, I give my fellow commuter the chance to calm down a little, and I deflect all of that anger and hatred and preserve my sense of calm, my focus as I continue along my way.
Even when a situation seems so personal, even if others insult you directly, it has nothing to do with you. What they say, what they do, and the opinions they give are according to the agreements they have in their own minds. Their point of view comes from all the programming they received during domestication.
Easier said than done. I know. It’s hard to deflect the attacks we are recipients of as we go along our journey; after all, we have been trained to fight back, protect and defend, rise and conquer.
We can still rise and conquer, but with kindness and self-love — and not with retaliatory anger. When we resist the urge to take things personally and choose to stay focused on our own path, we leave the battles on the field and carry on, centered and victorious.
What battles will you resist today in your efforts to not take anything personally?
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