Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Quieting the Monkey

Tuesday was a rough day.  In hopes of making Wednesday better, I decided to try to not say anything negative all day, including not being snarky through IM or Facebook or e-mail.

Guess what?

It turns out that I'm kind of a negative bitch.  I didn't realize it until I consciously decided to stop.

In one instance, I was in a situation and thinking about how I'd later share that situation with others... focusing on the ridiculous behavior of someone else, naturally.  I remembered that I wasn't going to do that today, and so I just sat there with the coworker while my monkey mind kept looking for ways to be negative.

It didn't take long for the chatter in my monkey mind to die down a bit.  What was the use of getting all ramped up about this when I wasn't going to share it with anyone so they could (obviously) agree that I was horribly put upon?  My monkey mind sulked.*

And then something unexpected happened.  The monkey cocked its head and said, "Maybe this person is here because she's afraid she's going to break something and feels that sitting with you will keep her from that."**

Huh.  That's not so bad.  That's quite nice, actually.  I suspect that it's also the truth.

I wonder what else the monkey has missed?

*I looked for a picture of a monkey playing the cymbals to put here, but HOLY COW are they creepy.  Just imagine there's a not creepy image here.


**You'll have to trust me that this makes sense in context.

1 comment:

  1. Hmm. I might have enjoyed my two years at a certain job even more if I had paused to think like this for even a moment.

    ReplyDelete