A Life Lesson

It's been a stressful week. That's all I'm going to say. It's not what is happening that I am going to write about, it's my perspective on dealing with stressful situations where opinions, emotions, and feelings are involved between at least two people. When I publish this blog as a book, I want to be able to come to this post as a reminder of my thinking.

A friend told me that one of the best things about me is that I'm not good at staying mad at people. There's something that I have learned which has influenced that about me. Life is short. You just don't know when someone's life is going to end. So why risk having the last thing you say to someone be an argument, or something said out of spite, or something that you just didn't mean but it came out in the heat of the moment? That's not how I choose to live. I don't go to sleep angry. I forgive and I apologise when I've done or said something that I shouldn't have. I think sometimes I even apologize too much but that's just in relation to how bad I feel. 

Instead of blaming other people or staying angry, I'm over the situation in anywhere from a matter of minutes to up to a few hours. When this happens I start to think only about how I could improve myself, either to deal with stress better, or to keep my emotions low in conflict, or just to become a better person. I am very self aware and I recognise my personality, the good qualities and the not so good ones. So which of those not so good ones can I work on changing? 

One of the ones I have changed and worked on is understanding other perspectives. I used to be stubborn, and I used to feel that I was always right. I don't think that way anymore, instead I try to empathise and put myself in other people's shoes to understand their thinking. Sometimes I still have a million questions, because often you can't understand exactly how a person thinks because you aren't in their brain but you can still try to take their perspective. That helps me to not stay mad and allows me to forgive people usually. 

There are some people that in my life that I haven't forgiven, but I can honestly say I'm not mad at them. I've just cut them out of my life because quite simply they didn't deserve to be in it. 

Anyways, I guess this time my not so good quality I want to work on is how I judge people and assume what they are thinking too easily. I'm not a mind reader, and I don't know why people think and act the way they do. In not a good way I can relate to the ladies of Desperate Housewives too easily. Either that or I've been so caught up in that show recently that their thinking and actions have started to influence mine!

I've also been told by friends how good of a writer I am, and how they can see how writing helps me to organise my thoughts. So like I said before, this blog post is more for myself than my audience but if anyone can just take an ounce of new perspective from it, or even just a new understanding of me as your friend or family member, than I am glad of that.