A couple of months ago, I caught up with a good friend on the phone. An opening came up for me to recommend Derek Sivers’s book, Useful Not True, and so I did.
I chatted with my friend again, a couple of days ago, and he told me the book resonated with him. Particularly, he referred to this passage:
You might say, “I can’t help the way I feel”, as if it’s completely out of your control — as if you have no choice and are unable to feel any other way. But you do have a choice. Think a different way and you’ll feel a different way. You choose your reaction. Not the first one, but the next.
It reminds me of Thich Nhat Hanh’s metaphor in No Mud, No Lotus (which I previously shared a fragment of here):
If an arrow hits you, you will feel pain in that part of your body where the arrow hit; and then if a second arrow comes and strikes exactly at the same spot, the pain will not be only double, it will become at least ten times more intense.
The unwelcome things that sometimes happen in life—being rejected, losing a valuable object, failing a test, getting injured in an accident—are analogous to the first arrow. They cause some pain. The second arrow, fired by our own selves, is our reaction, our storyline, and our anxiety. All these things magnify the suffering. Many times, the ultimate disaster we’re ruminating upon hasn’t even happened. We may worry, for example, that we have cancer and that we’re going to die soon. We don’t know, and our fear of the unknown makes the pain grow even bigger.
The second arrow may take the form of judgment (“how could I have been so stupid?”), fear (“what if the pain doesn’t go away?”), or anger (“I hate that I’m in pain. I don’t deserve this!”). We can quickly conjure up a hell realm of negativity in our minds that multiplies the stress of the actual event, by ten times or even more. Part of the art of suffering well is learning not to magnify our pain by getting carried away in fear, anger, and despair. We build and maintain our energy reserves to handle the big sufferings; the little sufferings we can let go.
You may have learned, or been conditioned, to cope with difficult emotions with emotional reactions. Sometimes, these can feel so close to your identity or core memories that you feel like they’re a part of your life.
They’re not.
When you learn the habit of pausing, breathing, relaxing, even for a couple of seconds, you gain an ability. You can step back, choose the next reaction, response, and next step more clearly.