All tagged Managing your emotions
Seth Godin recently wrote about how bitterness is consistent and impenetrable. If you let it, it can become “a wall you can lean against, whenever you choose”.
That resonated with me, as I’m sure it does with many of us. When we’ve been wronged (perceived or otherwise), it provides us with a point or direction towards which we can channel our emotions, most notably our anger.
One of the hardest things for me, and for any of us I suppose, is to be thoughtful in that space between stimulus and response. I’m referring, of course, to Victor Frankl’s observation that:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.”
One of the interesting byproducts of our COVID quarantine has been the amount of art that’s been created during this lockdown. And by art, I don’t just mean painting or music, what we consider to be art in the strict sense (although I do include both of those forms in my definition).
Rather, I’m referring to all forms of expression, any act of creativity, including the culinary arts.
There’s a couple of stages we go through when we’re angered by a particular situation we’re faced with.
First, we lose our cool and debate and question our predicament. We turn the situation over and over in our heads, incredulous, bemused and upset that this is happening to us. We wallow in the ‘why me’s’. This is sometimes inevitable but always unproductive.
