This Might Actually Work

Mike often times calls me a pessamist. I like to think of myself as a realist. Mike's reason for referring to me as such comes from my getting all worked up over things that haven't even happened yet. Before things like weddings, holiday get togethers or even just dropping the boys off at their mom's house, I tend to play out all the possible negative things that could happen. And then I prepare a couple of retorts. By the time we're ready to leave, I'm bent out of shape and huffing and puffing and, generally, not in a good mood.

I call myself a realist because I make my 'predictions' based on past experiences. If out of the last ten family get togethers, someone has said something rude during nine of them, what else am I supposed to believe? I end up thinking that more often that not, I have to arm myself with a retort because someone is going to say something rude. Rather than going into detail about all the times that I get worked up over something that has yet to happen, I'll sum it up by saying it happens to me more than five times a day. So what am I to do?

The answer came from Eat, Pray, Love (surprise, surprise). Elizabeth Gilbert talks about the mind as a harbor, or a place of refuge. And all the negative, angry, debilitating, harmful, abusive waves of thoughts are not allowed inside the harbor. She repeats to herself, "I will not harbor unhealthy thoughts anymore". I decided to take this on as my new mantra (because counting to ten is so 1987). And this morning, as I watched Colby scrape the butter off his knife back into the container (and I quickly pointed out why he shouldn't do that), rather than sitting and stewing about teenagers and all the things it seems they are incapable of doing, I repeated my mantra over and over again until I could feel the waves in my mind settling down. Shortly after that, I stubbed my pinky toe on the breakfast bar. And I discovered there's always room in the harbor for one good F-bomb.