All For The Best

Everyday coming home from class I take the same bus and pass the same bridge with the words “Everything is for the best” written in graffiti on the side. A while back I had been reading “The Zen Art of Happiness” and one of the first messages or lessons in the book was talking about seeing everything that befalls you to be for the best. There are many times when I can look at things and say yeah if I didn’t make that choice then X, Y, and Z wouldn’t have happened. At the same time you can look at bad things that are happening and just feel like the sky is falling.

I always get the feeling that when it rains it pours. Take for example a few weeks ago my watch battery died. Perfectly natural thing to happen, I’ve been wearing for over a year and this was bound to happen. Saturday night I go out to get a new battery and life is good again. On the following Friday my boyfriend and I go to the beach where my watch get a little wet (okay it kind of took a swim) and everything seemed fine. Saturday morning my watch is no longer working. These two events on their own don’t seem all that bad, it was extremely annoying not having a watch for my final exams and getting used to not wearing one, but no reason to feel like the end of the world was coming. Until Monday afternoon when one of my headphones started acting up, where by Wednesday they were dead. Then all of the sudden its like the world is coming to an end. Too many bad things are happening too close together and I no longer know what to do!

I have been working on dialing back my reactions to when the sky is falling. I have a regular habit of listening to the Jillian Micheals podcasts (I’m very behind) and there was one that really felt like it hit home. She was talking about admitting that you have anger in your life and working on controlling and managing it. Ways that she talked about controlling it were to have a tantrum mat, a place that you could just get all your anger out in a safe environment, writing a handwritten letter to the person you are angry at and then trowing it away. Just getting the aggression out is key is not letting the world get to you.

Last year I took up running and that was the one thing that really kept me sane with all the things that were going on in my life. After moving to a third floor walk up apartment I just stopped having the energy to go for a run and then have to tackle those stairs that I gave it up. That seems to be the biggest mistake that I made this year. Had I been pounding the pavement to get that aggression out then all the little things wouldn’t be adding up to so much weight like they are now.

So I guess the take away here is that you have to find what keeps you calm. Thank god none of us are the hulk and will smash buildings with our anger but that doesn’t mean that we don’t really cause damage in our lives. Every time I go down that rabbit-hole of this happened, and then that, and she said, it pisses me off! And I just go and unload all that nonsense on the people in your life it just drives them away, but if you keep it all in then all this aggression and anger just consumes you.

There are certain realizations that we have to come to. Things like we can’t fix everything, things that happen in our lives happen for the best possible reason and that its all for the best. You just have to get there, to see the messages that are out there around you and internalize them.

That message on the wall is a reminder to me everyday that “everything is for the best” and that we have to start realizing and taking advantage of it.