If I had my druthers, everyone on the planet would be in a program. Maybe not for drugs or alcohol, or even addiction, but just a general "Life Anonymous" program. Hi, my name is Tim, and I'm a jerk. Not for any particular reason at this moment, but the potential is there, waiting for the moment that I lose control of something, anything that I feel has any impact on my current or future happiness. Cut me off in traffic and if I'm having a bad day already, I'll probably mutter to myself and critique your driving/paternity. If its a good day, I'll wish that my Honda came equipped with rockets. It's a good thing it doesn't. I'd use them daily and that particular brand of lack-of-self-control, the wanton-destruction-involving-rockets-and-Honda's gets very expensive. Not that I've priced rockets.
Babies cry. I get that. Sometimes they freak out and cry for two seconds in the middle of the night and scare the life out of you. Sometimes they cry from 1am till 4 am or 1 am until 12:45 am the next night, stopping only to eat and sleep. It happens, and it is beyond my control. Sometimes I don't respond as well as I should. Sometimes I imagine throwing myself from the balcony to escape the screaming. Don't worry though, I live on the ground floor, so it's more of a modified Shatner-roll out onto the sidewalk.
During one of my weekends in Boston I saw an elderly Alan Alda-like gentleman banging on the hood of a taxi with an umbrella. On a bad day, I'm on that level, at least mentally. I think that we all are. We think of ourselves as being civilized people, but I think that we lose quite a bit of our civility when we are faced with the challenge of dealing with other people. The more people that you get around eachother the less civilized we become. Traffic, baseball games, post offices, political conventions, we lose our mind somehow when we are faced with the masses in almost any form. Humans are pack animals, but there is a limit to the size of the pack and the number of people that can fill any particular roll. With too many people, we lose control of the world around us and in turn eventually cede control of ourselves... we let it get to us; road-rage, soccer riots, going postal, political conventions. Throw into the mix places that we don't want to be, situations that we don't want to be in, decisions that we don't want to make and things that could potentially go wrong and life gets pretty unmanageable. It pushes us all to our limits.
I'm in the middle of two potential attitudes every time I start my day. Self-helpers call it being either right or happy. When I choose happy, I play alot of pretend. I pretend that I let people in instead of getting cut off. I pretend that referees have better sense than I do about calls being made on the field and I pretend that politics doesn't exist. Usually though, I'd rather be right, and within my rights and have my rights and take the right of way. That leads to pricing rockets for the Honda.
I get to choose; expensive rockets or happiness. I probably don't play nearly enough pretend.
