Sunday

Disappointment. Life piles racks and racks and racks of hard plastic pallets of disappointment upon us, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. And why? Because that is the way that life works. Because without disappointment, we could never feel joy. We could never feel accomplishment. We could never feel success. Thank you, disappointment, for the great gifts that you make way for.
Recently when I read the Daily Om, which comes to me by e-mail every day, it had some excellent advice for all those annoyances that shout at us in our thoughts when we come across those annoyances. The writer of the Daily Om says to listen to those thoughts, acknowledge them for what they are -- messages to ourselves that define the moment for us -- separate the actual event from the way our minds processed it, and then mentally watch those thoughts move on as we let them go. To illustrate, imagine that I've been anticipating seeing a certain movie on a certain Saturday night at a certain time. Imagine that it didn't happen for one reason or another. Instead, I and five other people go see a movie I've already seen. I hear in my head that I rarely get to actually see a movie at the theater that I have chosen and I'm able to get everyone, or even someone, who I want to come, to come along. I hear in my head that this, out of all seven possibilities, is the only movie showing that I really don't want to watch. I listen to those thoughts, and I recognize that the messages I'm hearing have very little to do with the event of actually watching this movie, and that each one of the six people in our group will have different thought processes about going to see this movie, none of them quite like mine.
I've been trying to imagine my thoughts as a little train car that comes and goes through the roundhouse in my head, these past few days, and it really helps dispel the negativity I feel in the normal everyday course of events in my life. There it is, that nasty, unpleasant thought, I see it, and there it goes. As a result, I am more detached than I have been since adolescence. I don't know if that's good or bad. The buddhists would say it is good. That I am on the path to spiritual enlightenment, or something like that.