Stubbing Your Toe
As you twist and turn under the covers at night, you may twist and turn during the day about life. It would seem that for every joy, you have three annoyances or aggravations or downright woe. Let the annoyances fly away. Keep the joy. Eradicate the sense of annoyance that you have been allowing yourself to have. You have been wronging yourself.
The way it’s been for many or most, over and over again, is that, when you stub your toe, you keep stubbing it. Stub is an interesting word because it is linked to the word stubborn in English. You just don’t want to budge. Someone wasn’t nice to you, and you continue the dialogue and interaction in your thoughts. You are good at doing that. You are a pro.
The offending person is not beside you around the clock, yet you are beside yourself with emotion, and you keep the offender in your outraged thoughts. You keep the offender close, as if you had nothing else to do, as if you had nothing else to live for but to recount, reemphasize, relive, remake, renew all the affronts that troubled you and trouble you still. You count your accumulation of wrongs as if they were a wad of money.
Let go of the offenses and the offenders, and you will no longer have them. You have been nursing the viperishness in your own bosom. You say to yourself a thousand times over: “Look what they did to me. Look at how they wronged me.” And so you wrong yourself over and over again. Must you prove time and time again what you see as the heartlessness and wayward thinking of others?
The fact is, when you are in that state of mind, you are mastering the very skills you purport to have contempt for. You have contempt. These others were contemptuous, and now you are contemptuous. They had no respect. And now you have no respect for them nor for yourself, or you would not keep the contempt alive and well, churning in your heart, in your mind, turning your blood into vinegar.
Have regard for yourself and get out of that old mind-set. A minute was too long to have it. You have had it for years, perhaps a lifetime. Say adieu to those old ways of thinking. Sink them. Pretend they are golf balls. Picture hitting each old golf ball of thought with a strong stroke. The golf ball goes far away over the fairway and out of your hair.
Forgive Me for dwelling on the past when I tell you to get out of it. The thing is you have not seen what you have been doing to yourself. See and dismiss. See and desist. How can you hit the ball out of the park unless you see it?
Or play football rather than golf and kick the old habits of thought out of the field. You are inundated with them. You feel you have to be on top. You have to control. Or you may have to control by being put upon, as if that is worth your whole life. You put yourself into a slot where you make happen what you protest. It keeps coming up again, the same old situations. It is the past that motivates and controls you. You have been in the thrall of the past. You have not let yourself go. It is you who gives yourself a stiff neck.
If you have been dragging yourself in the mud, it makes sense to get out of it.
If you have been thinking that you have been persecuted, you persecute yourself. You have become a dancer in life then who knows only one step.
Life dances to the tune of your own thoughts. As you think, so goes your life. Turn your thoughts around, and so will your life turn.
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