You're Invited - Meb

          I've been thinking a lot about perspective lately. Like many of you, I have been working on my Gratitude; really, really working on it, but there are still moments where I think the Universe absolutely conspires to frustrate me - and these are the moments that seem to go on forever as if caught in their own expanding time warp.

          I am grateful for my computer and printer AND I pull my hair out when one or the other inevitably has a bad day on the very day I am under a deadline. I love the Bay Area AND unless you time it perfectly, you'll spend more time in traffic than you do watching the movie you went out to see in the first place. I am happy I don't have food insecurity AND now, thanks to Weight Watchers, I'm reading every darn label and calculating each bite I take by way of some algorithm I hardly understand. Mostly, I love my job, AND I am truly thankful for having a job, but today, the plane is late and the lines at the airport are crazy long. Also, this morning, the intricacies of a garage door opener that has a mind of its own had me stumped and I had to disconnect it just to get out the door and to the airport on time. Which thankfully, I did, and thankfully, though the lines were long and the plane was late, I got to where I was going, which is for work, and, did I mention I am truly grateful for work? Thankfully, I got here in one piece. Really working at this gratitude attitude!

           I don't know abut you, but I can get in a bad place where I end up reacting to and focusing on what's broken and in need of fixing (or in need of my intervention to prevent imminent disaster) maybe more than I focus on what is going well. This trait might have had a Darwinian benefit at one time in history but in this modern era, when I catch myself not being really grateful, I feel guilty for demonstrating a very dis-grateful "attachment" disorder (e.g. If I wasn't attached to the outcome, I wouldn't feel irritated) or worse, a marked shallowness in character. Good Grief! How did a nice girl like me get into a headspace like this?

          I could possibly have  the First World "Flu." I hear it's going around. Last week, I was at a meeting where a group of women were complaining that they had bought the book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and were trying to follow its principles of de-cluttering and letting go of what doesn't serve them, make them happy, isn't useful, etc. They had inherited sets of crystal and china from parents who couldn't take it with them and having their own, they wanted to give the inherited ones to their children. But their kids didn't want any of it. At first, my friends felt irritated and then they realized they were just sad to think that their parents' belongings had no where to go but to Goodwill.

          Marianne Williamson said, "Every irritation is an invitation to love." Maybe being irritated about something or by someone is really about your heart and not about what your thinking head tells you. Maybe under your irritation is a crazy feeling that if the little things in life can't be organized and kept in working order, one is not in control of anything. 

          My friends and I have been talking lately about how it's easy to feel terribly out of control about the BIG stuff going on in the world. We've been told, over and over we can "only control ourselves" but we want the world to be different. We share a collective heartache.

          The burden of being a compassionate person who feels impotent in the face of refugees, cancer, extreme poverty, gun violence and impacts of economic upheaval is real. Many empathetic people like you and me feel genuine sadness and loss - our heart aches - when we view or hear about other people's pain and suffering. Did you know that trauma experts  found that children who watch scenes like the Twin Towers falling down or scenes of the devastating effects of Katrina, or depictions of child refugees from Syria on the TV news can be more affected, show more symptoms of PTSD, than the children who are in the actual disaster? It's easy to feel child-small and not know what to do in the face of so much world craziness and pain. 

          Katie is fond of saying, "Go Big or Go Home." Maybe we should also say, "Go Big and Not Small." In addition to finding something to be grateful for each day, I can work on intentionally opening my heart up when I am irritated, instead of making my heart smaller like Mr. Grinch to protect it. As a child, when I got hurt my mother used to say, "Offer it up." Back then, especially as a teen, I thought this was insensitive. But maybe in her way, she was saying, "Raise it up to the Heavens, because Heaven knows all the world's pain and we are all in God's hands." She was telling me to Take the High Road, so to speak. Like AA says, give it over to God as you understand him. 

           What would it be like to love myself enough so that when I am feeling really irritated about something, I take a deep breath, disconnect from the sense that everything in the whole wide world is getting broken and out of control, and imagine my heart opening up to Love? How would the world be better, if when we feel irritated at someone we open up our heart and focus on how we love them instead? Viewed this way, an irritation is just a warning signal that I am hurt or sad. It tells me to fix that; I need to trust I am being held by a loving God who has brought me through the big stuff and can get me past this irritating event. And wow, this makes me feel grateful!

          Now this is irritating. I have to stop writing. I'm here in Las Vegas for work, which I am grateful for, remember; even it it is Sunday, and I am on a deadline to finish this newsletter. Can you believe this? The hotel fire alarm just went off and we have to evacuate. It's 110 degrees outside, People!

         Working on opening my heart, visioning my heart opening up...I'll let you now how this goes!