Reflected Back

While I discovered this a long time ago, and have known this for ages, only recently have I begun to truly understand the truth of what irritates me in others is usually something about myself with which I am uncomfortable, and reflected back to me in some manner. Rather than try to figure out why that person does what they do (what I spent a great deal of my life doing), I am better served trying to learn what that person is in my life to teach me.

I think mostly my lessons revolve around acceptance of others, and loving them right where they are. It’s very strange how often I have believed others should behave as I thought they ought.

Perhaps not so strange. I remember something my mother (whom I loved dearly and respected in most ways) would say, generally after some little confrontation of a sort with someone who didn’t perform as my mother believed they ought.

“I just gave them something to think about!”

Like they had lived their entire lives in the dark, and suddenly, the light shown, and they saw things clearly! Slap me in the middle of the forehead, and thank you for opening my eyes.

Sometimes I sorely need to point out what others are doing that is obviously making the world an uncomfortable place to be. Well, maybe just the space around me. I want to tell them the sound of their voice is giving me an earache. I need to tell them their need to rearrange the chairs is that struggle for control they are still working on (and maybe not so successfully). I want to make a snappy retort to the one that seems to KNOW IT ALL (and clearly doesn’t)!

It’s not about them. It’s all about me. My control needs, my knowing it all, and the sound of my voice, and the list can, and does, go on.

I wonder whose ‘lessons of life’ I am?