Life in Gestalt

All The Little Things

LUCIEN LETTERS

Dear Lucien,

When you're trying to meet a deadline, the last thing you want is an endless cacophony of distractions, little and great. It's a herculean effort to even separate the little things that poke holes on your equanimity from the greater things actually having legitimate basis with which to require your attention.

Today, however, I am resigned to the fact that I'm no Hercules. :)

It seemed all the little things were conspiring against me today. Too little even, that I won't enumerate them. In hindsight, now that I'm done with work, I can't see why I was remotely concerned about it. I actually find that some of them were hilarious (like putting on earplugs because my neighbors were at their mysterious excavation/renovation/repair fetish again). I think it's more a test of concentration than patience to be oblivious to the thousand and one stimuli trying to make themselves felt in your immediate environment. Guess I should thank yoga for giving me that sense of 'focus'. For all that it's so overhyped on home shopping television commercials, yoga actually helps me restore my sense of 'personal balance'. (Trust me, if ever you've tried doing one of those complicated arabesques, you'll know balance is no joke. Haha.)

Someone once told me, "what angers you reveals you". I think he was right. Anger tells us what we do NOT value, what we do NOT affirm, even what we DO reject. I've often found that persons slow to anger are less difficult to appease because their anger is evoked by something deeply rooted. Those roots have to be explored before the anger can be assuaged. Persons prone to regular outbursts of irritation and fury, however, find their rage easily spent after being vented on someone or something. Often as not, these are people who care broadly about many things. My friend Mike (short for 'Michelle'), for example, is one of those people. I like calling her the Messiah in my group of friends, because she cares for almost everything and almost everyone. She can get in a rage over someone else's problems fairly easily too. Hahaha. Mike is the ultimate ally --- she does not sympathize, but empathizes. She takes your cause as her own. :)

Conversely, my friends like to call me the 'ice queen', mainly because I very rarely get angry over anything. Certainly NOT because I'm akin to a saint, but more because there are few things in life I DO choose to care about. I can get completely indifferent even if a friend does things which should offend me, but she doesn't know they don't. I didn't use to be like this, and I can vaguely remember being similar in character to Mike when I was younger. My only explanation to myself is that as I grew older the persons, things, and interests which demanded my attention also grew exponentially...and my only 'defense' against the almost ceaseless maelstrom was the exercise of discretion. There are battles worth fighting, some worth turning away from. There are people in my life I always choose to keep in touch with and they don't know that reveals exactly how much I care. There is a time for everything, as the Bible says, and a place for everything.

Sounds obsessive-compulsive? Of course. :) Makes for one heck of a way to isolate all the little things that try to intrude in my personal universe though. The most I can say is, in my universe by choice, NOTHING is ever little.

Fide.

Angel Fidelis

Posted by Angel Fidelis at October 23, 2002 05:54 PM