A moratorium on negativity

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed yesterday and I struggled to regain my equilibrium late into the morning. Everything can seem out of proportion when you live in a 20' travel trailer. With the recent feeling of being thin skinned and a natural tendency toward empathy, I have an increased sponge-like ability to take on other people's emotional states. So when I wake to a call that my massage has been cancelled, my trailer mate complains of a bad belly, and the lawn mower roars outside, I'll admit I didn't handle it well.

I made complaints, numerous ones, in fact. Outside of my head, it might have even sounded like I was whining, which is true because inside my mind it sounded like a temper tantrum. In this moment, it doesn't matter how little I want to be like this - reduced to a filter that only allows frustrations and irritations to pass into my consciousness - I descend into the depths of not good enough and there I am. In a pit, like one of those oubliettes used to torture people, alone with their thoughts and little else.

Yes, I exaggerate, but it's all part of feeling a feeling with total committment, in order to then allow it to pass. I know my trailer mate didn't much appreciate this method I experimented with at the start of our day, but since he went to work I was free to figure out how to pass through the mess of emotions that had formed a noxious cloud to stink up my thinking.

With an unexpected morning free to indulge my mood, I laced up and ratched tight my roller blades over knee high socks and added the essential knee pads, wrist guards and neon orange trucker's cap for visibility. I cranked up the tunes after I made it to the relative safety of the bike path, and skated my way to a better attitude. Excercise improves my perspective on the world, and roller blading has the added factor of being silly and also graceful in moments. When my whole body becomes involved in forward motion and it's long legs and long arms swinging and the music adds an element of dance, it's moving meditation.

I returned home and decided I'd choose to enjoy the day, whatever it brought. I had work, I got some tasks started or completed, I recovered an expensive and difficult to replace window frame for the Airstream that had gone misssing after I took it to a shop to have glass cut for it, I worked somewhere else, and I ate sushi for dinner with my happy to see me trailer mate. I chose a different attitude, and if I had to fake my way into it at first, I eventually found it.

Now I'm committed to a moratorium on negativity. Ironic but it's a little intimidating - sometimes a focus on the rubbish side of things seems easier to fulfill. Who cares about that, though? I'd like to be happy and I'm pretty sure it's a habit, just like the choice to see the worst in any given situation can be. I'm starting with a week, in the hopes it will spill over into a month, a year, the rest of my days. Habit forming happiness, this is something for which I aspire.

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