Action/Reaction: Failure in 2012 and What to Do About It

“You will not be judged on what people do to you, but how you react.”–Anonymous

On my bad days, I react to events like water poured on boiling oil, burning everyone in sight, even those trying to help.  You could say I have an itchy trigger finger, ready to attack anything that provokes me with my semi-automatic tongue.

One of the reasons I practice meditation every day is to become aware of exactly when my “fire” ignites. If I can catch a negative reaction when it is just one thought, I can extinguish it before my anger and frustration create a three alarm catastrophe. Like a single matchstick, it is easy to blow out a negative thought with a smile or a breath of gratitude. This practice has quadrupled the number of happy moments I experience daily and changed the course of my life.

But after reading the posts by Mirth and Motivation and Professions for PEACE in response to the Newtown  shooting, I realized that simply responding to external events is not good enough.

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Prison Awakening

I originally wrote this fictional epistolary piece for the DPChallenge: Shift Your Perspective, until I re-read the challenge and found out that you had to write about blogging. I decided to post this story anyway after reading Professions for Peace’s posts about forgiveness and stumbling and Tracy’s post about letting go. I also think it applies to Mirth and Motivation’s post FOCUS: PEACE. I apologize for any offensive language; I was trying to portray the character as realistically as possible. 

Dear Edward,

I hope this letter finds you well. I know we haven’t spoken in sometime now, but I recently heard about your incarceration and I wanted to reach out to you. I know everything about the case, and I wanted you to know that I still love you. I will help watch over your kids until you get out.

If you want to write back, here is my new address:

Grace Osborne-Dufresne
199 E. Pearl Ave Gate #7
Harmony, Ca 93435

Hoping to hear from you,
Grace

The Animated GIF: The Antithesis of Mindfulness

People who like GIFs (a series of images that create the impression of movement) are the same folks who slow down on the freeway to try to catch a glimpse of something gruesome after a car wreck. Ok, that’s a bit of an over-generalization taken out of context meant to be incendiary, which is a pretty good definition of an animated GIF.