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Patience
Have you ever been on the phone with a cable or internet company? If you have, I am sorry. If you haven’t, consider yourself lucky. I have never once heard someone say, “Oh, I just called my cable company to get this done and it was super easy.” It is almost always something like this, “I called the cable company today. That’s it - it took all day I couldn’t get anything else done.” It is in times like these, that we can really use some patience.
This past week I moved into an apartment, and you guessed it, had to get my wifi installed and working. I’ll spare you the details, but over the course of one week I had to make 5 phone calls and 3 web chats only to find out I had all the equipment I needed from the start. I think I spent over 7 hours trying to communicate with my wifi provider and ended up talking with a robot 50% of the time, and was transferred enough times to talk with 8 different agents. I’m not gonna lie, it was a terrible experience, and somehow at the end of it all I ended up with an extra wifi modem that I don’t even need and now have to send back so I don’t get changed for it. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a little part of me that just wants to throw it off the balcony. Although the process could’ve been better, I still learned some things. On several occasions, I had to withhold my anger from coming out onto the person on the other end of the line in an undeserved outburst. I think when we are forced to be patient against our will there is often a sense of anger that we don’t know what to do with.
Being in a situation where your only option is to just sit and be patient is not fun. I think a lot of people have found themself in a situation like this recently due to the pandemic - we have no control of anything happening and our only option is to be patient and pray for things to get better quickly. But accompanying this forced patience, is also often a sense of anger. We don’t want to be all cooped up anymore, we don’t want to continue to live our lives so separated from other people, and we want to resume our normal lives, but we can’t - and that is angering! Now I’m not here to tell you that you can’t be angry, I think some amount of anger is probably healthy, it is just important to make sure that your anger doesn’t unfairly come down on others. I can’t tell you how many times through this pandemic I have witnessed or heard about people unfairly taking their anger out on others.
So that is my challenge to you this week: when you feel yourself getting angry, take a few seconds to notice that anger, and try not to let it unfairly fall on someone else. I understand, sometimes anger just comes over us and we’re yelling before we know it - and it can feel good to release that. But I think if we all take just two seconds to notice our anger before acting on it, we’ll start living in a more peaceful world - because 99.9% of the time, anger is not the answer, love and patience are.
Stay Motivated,
-Dan
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