You Say Roadblock, I Say Reality

This week, I offer a real-life example of what’s possible when you don’t argue with reality. I recently had a speaking engagement in northern California (I posted the video last week; you can see it here), and it seemed like it would be a good idea to have the audio program I’d just finished available for sale.

Well, I did everything I could to get the audio program finished before I left for the Christmas holiday (eight days and two states). My deadline to get materials to the fulfillment center that would make copies of the audio program and create the cases was Jan. 2. I got home Dec. 30, thinking there was plenty of time to make last-minute edits and get everything taken care of.

A few hours after returning home, a huge wind storm hit and the power went out. No problem; we are used to this happening, as we live in the woods, so we have a generator at the ready. The next morning, my husband fired it up and left for work. I had the rest of the week off, so I went into my home office to finalize the artwork with my designer and check in with the CD fulfillment center.

But I couldn’t get online. No Internet connection. So I checked the modem and followed the power cord to its energy source and figured out what was wrong. Okay, modem up and Internet working. I finalized the artwork and the designer would send me the final PDFs. Then I read the email from my contact at the fulfillment center; turns out that Jan. 2 would no longer work as a deadline because the company would be closed. That meant I would have to finish and mail the CD masters that day.

I only had one CD left to edit, so I did that fairly quickly. I gathered up the master CDs and drove down the street to my post office, only to discover that it was already closed. Why? Because, as you’ve surely guessed, they had closed early for New Year’s Eve.

I drove back home and called the central post office. A person answered (whew!) and I asked when they were closing. “We’re already closed,” the man said, “but the post office on Morrissey is open until 3:00.” That gave me an hour to get there, wait in line and mail the package.

So off I drove. I got to the post office, stood in line and paid extra for expedited shipping. If the fulfillment center could get the masters on Monday, they could process the order and send me a few copies of the audio program directly to the hotel where I was speaking.

Now, be honest: at what point in this process would you have started to freak out? At the first roadblock? The second? The fifth? Not so long ago, I would have done the same. I am prone, due to my personality type (Enneagram Seven), to want everything to be easy. This Sevenness also gets irritable quickly when things are not easy, when the world does not serve me. And all of us who grew up in efficiency-obsessed America would be likely to be irritated by this string of setbacks.

Instead, a wonderful thing happened. As I encountered each event that did not meet with my expectations, I was able to adjust and flow with what reality presented. Not once was I angry or impatient. In fact, so many “roadblocks” happened in a row that it struck me as funny, and I was able to chuckle at the next thing and the next. As I stood in the longish line at the post office, I was able to take in the presence of the people waiting with me, to embrace them in my heart as fellow human beings all sharing a common goal. I loved them all, including the man angry about a package mix-up and the woman of questionable mental health who was being rude to one of the clerks.

This is what life can be like when you don’t argue with reality. Suffering is reduced or goes away altogether, because you are not striving against what is. You are able to be present, living in and responding to each moment, maybe even able to acknowledge and love those around you whom you wouldn’t have even noticed before.

I wish I could live in that place all the time! But I don’t. If you had seen me trying to figure out how to upload my video to iTunes, how to find the uploaded video in Windows 8, and so on (this process took hours over several days), you would know! But I can tell you that I live in this place at least a little bit each day, and I have experienced so much less “suffering” (anger, frustration, impatience, selfishness) as a result. I hope you’ll agree that the work it takes every day to learn to be present to reality is worth it. I hope you’ll keep working at it right along with me.

Postscript: my “expedited” package that was guaranteed to arrive the following Monday showed up, oh, on Wednesday or Thursday. This, too, is reality. Another opportunity to embrace what is.

PLEASE SHARE