“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”

- Gandhi

When angry or holding resentment, the way out is forgiveness. This usually comes naturally at some point, but after a confrontation, there can be a good chunk of time where the natural impulse is hold on to that resentment, generating ill will towards your adversary, almost as if it were a punishment for the pain that has been caused.

After such an event, most of the anger and frustration that follows comes from your interpretation. If the interpretation is resentful, remind yourself that you can see things differently. Perhaps someone was careless or made a mistake, and maybe because of some past pain they were even vengeful. It doesn’t matter. The ongoing pain that is felt is your own attempt to keep the memory alive.
Admitting that you are perpetuating your agony is quite difficult to do. Usually after a cooling off period, it is easier to see the event in a better light, but the challenge is to start looking for forgiveness the moment feelings of anger or annoyance arise. Even right in the middle of it. And if you don’t feel like letting go, ask your higher self for help – a genuine question of how to forgive a situation is always answered. The quicker your forgive, the quicker you return to peace.

It started as a week long Mind Chatter exercise for the Creativity & Personal Mastery class, where I wrote down the thoughts in my head periodically during the day, and the emotional tenor that I felt at the time (and whether they felt positive or negative). At the end of the week, I gathered the half-dozen pages of thoughts I had managed to capture, and categorized them. What I discovered is that I tend think about the same thing, over and over and over. Or if not the same thing, the same type of thing. Often like a broken record. It pointed out how insanely redundant, pointless, and often negative my thoughts are.

This was the beginning to becoming aware of my thoughts. Over time, this exercise has transformed into a check when I’m feeling frustrated or annoyed. I survey what thoughts I have been having, what the intent is behind them, and what the emotional undertone is (irritation, frustration, fear, thoughtfulness, grace, loving kindness…)

A few months after using this exercise, I found myself feeling irritated that I had so many negative thoughts in my head. I was staring in the mirror having this argument with myself, almost punishing myself for having such negative dialog going around in my head. But then, something inside of me intervened, and I realized that my mental dialog at that moment was just negative mental dialog about… having negative mental dialog. And with a weird expression on my face, I realized that this was not just silly, but really, really silly. Even more importantly, in that moment, I realized that it was possible to let go of the negativity and shift to a more useful dialog by just letting go, even while there were certain uncomfortable feelings still inside of me.

Just letting it go wasn’t a new concept, but it was new understanding what this felt like – to be firm with myself and tell myself that the thought I wanted to think no longer served me, and to allow something new to arise. I didn’t need to force myself to think differently – instead, I had to recognize that it didn’t fulfill the purpose I believed it did, and that in fact, the thought had no purpose.

What does it mean to truly see, to see things as they are?

To see things as they are, is to see them without interpretation or judgement. If you look at a table, and think “I see a table”, the table is lost, and you don’t see the table, but your mind’s interpretation. This would become apparent if I asked you to look away, and then tell me the color of the table. Perhaps you would respond, “brown”, or “white”.

But if you look more closely, you see that this is not true. The table isn’t one uniform color. If this was true it would look flat and two dimensional. It has a variety of shades, tones, and even various colors reflecting off in different lights. Perhaps it is a wood table, and has complex textures and grains. Maybe another object in the room, of a different color, is creating a reflection in the table. Look again, and you see a rich variety of colors, not a single one.

And aside from color, I could ask what shape the table is. A square with four legs, you might respond. But if you look again, what you see is probably more like a stretched parallelogram with various extensions. Most likely you can only see a couple legs. Four legs exist only in your memory and interpretation. And if you walk around the table, at every moment, the shape that you see changes.

This changing shape is much more true. It is unique, based on your current experience. To describe it in words would most likely fill a novel. Even so, it is difficult to convey with words, as words themselves communicate through the learned meaning attached to them. Over time you come to understand meaning in words, but this meaning is built up of your past experiences. Specific connotations of words and phrases can vary significantly from person to person, especially between cultures, so words themselves are not even constant between people.

So, what started as a simple table, is now a complex object, which you naturally simplify based on your historical knowledge of what a table is and how you use it. But this label of a “table” is not the truth of your experience.

If this is true of a table, how about everything else you’re thinking about during the day?

HSBC recently decided to send out security devices to all of their customers, as an extra measure of security on the website. I postponed activating it until today because I find it quite irritating to have an additional “thing” I’ve got to carry around with me and this extra step when logging into my account.

It is interesting how this irritating plays out. In my head there was a dialog of whether or not it made sense to switch to a new bank account. Yes, it is bothersome, but I transfer money to other HSBC accounts, and doing this from another bank would be even more bothersome, so bottom line, I am not going to switch.

Then, I kept having thoughts of how I would seek my revenge for this unwarranted attack on my now more complicated log-in procedure. First, I’d lose my card. Then, I’d complain when I was out and didn’t have my card with me. Finally I’d press the button repeatedly until the battery wore out.

The worst part, is that these thoughts are just background mental chatter, and are not something I would take action on. But when I think them, I feel even more irritated. So really, I’m just generating thoughts that make me feel more miserable. This apparent attack in my head on some nameless corporation serves only as an attack myself. What purpose does that serve?

None. It is pure pain-inducing silliness.

Well, for the first time, I created my first project on git, the collaborative version control system… posting updates to a wordpress script that I used to convert posts from wordpress to evernote.

http://github.com/adammorris/Luis-Rei-Wordpress-to-Evernote

Maybe now I can call myself a real programmer.

The street was crowded this morning, as I walked into the place where I work. It was a bit annoying. There were people everywhere. Not like in India, but like a Monday morning in London.

London is quite a diverse city. Lots of cultures, ages, backgrounds, walking paces. There was an elderly lady with a stroller. A few touristy looking people and construction workers. And tons of people in work cloths bustling along.

I wasn’t annoyed specifically at any one of them – I didn’t even know “them”, yet still they managed to collectively emerge into the exact location where I was trying to walk. I just wanted to walk at my own bustling pace, and couldn’t. Annoyed.

So I turned left and walked back along a different street. There were no people there. The street was oddly quiet and peaceful. And, yes, I felt happy again.

In Chennai, India, there are people everywhere. There are just a lot of people. And they move at a very different pace. It boggles my mind… yet it never bothers me. London is practically uninhabited in comparison, and yet I get easily disturbed. The only difference seems to be that in London, I am trying to get somewhere.

I seem to have attributed the sight of all these people as an obstacle to my walking pace, and felt annoyed as a result. Not really a productive reaction. If I was slightly more aware, then I would have just accepted that this was so, and then turned left without any of these thoughts that left me feeling more stressed.

This is easy for me to grasp in this situation, but how many situations during the day do I react to something I see negatively, with some fictional meaning that I’ve created?

You might think that this would lead to utter chaos. But apparently in practice, people not only achieve better results (otherwise they’ll get fired), but they do so on their own terms, so they enjoy their work more, and it seems to be give people incentives to maximize their personal and company effectiveness – because now they own their time.

The team that inspired this change at Best Buy has broken off and formed CultureRx to assist in leading a cultural revolution to spread this highly effective practice.

I heard recently the one of the top reasons people leave their job is a lack of a friend at work, or a bad relationship with their boss. No wonder it is important to make everyone feel included.

• Paradox: Life is a mystery; don’t waste time figuring it out.
• Humor: Keep a sense of humor, especially about yourself. It is a strength beyond all measure.
• Change: Know that nothing stays the same.

Stuck trying to figure everything out? Perhaps the answer is to stop trying, and just act in life along the path that comes naturally.

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