stop wishing bad things would happen to rude strangers

So I needed a walk around the block today, but where I’m working we get dumped out onto Times Square. The minute I was outside, the hustlers and touts crowded around. I was annoyed for a block, but then I tried to shake it off and… I saw a dragonfly on 45th street! I followed it until I lost it in traffic, but then I decided to count the things worth noticing. I heard five languages [French, Spanish, Thai, Japanese and Mandarin], noticed that the WSJ is a block away in a building that sells expensive shirts, and found a small gallery that is normally closed when I get out of work. Much better…

The other day I was in the post office and waited in the line to use the machine. For some reason the machine wouldn’t let me add delivery confirmation to my package and told me to get into the regular line. I was so annoyed about it… I kept thinking about all the other times I went to the post office and just kept feeling more bitter. Somewhere in the spiral, I realised what was going on, and realised that it was similar to these other situations. I dragged my thoughts back to more ordinary things and tried to keep my mind away from the sore spot.

I think if I hadn’t taken up this goal, I would have plugged away at those old annoyances ‘til I’d had my fill. There’s really no reason to spiral into them. It doesn’t do me any good to think about every minor slight that has ever happened to me in a postal facility. It’s not like I can go back in time to when I was in middle school and warn my mother before she sent out that package to my uncle without insurance!

I’m going to close out this goal, but I feel like I’ve at least started a new brain-habit. Even Times Square hasn’t bothered me lately…

and he brought up this basic idea. It’s interesting to hear my thoughts echoed by someone else…

Maybe it’s the nice weather, or maybe I just haven’t run into as many jerks, but I had a good walking week last week. I heard people make mean remarks and I’ve been blockaded by slow moving tourists, but I didn’t let them get to me…

I was doing fine walking across Times Square yesterday when someone dropped a lit cigarette on my shoe! Yuck! I shot them a dirty look, but the guy was taking a picture of something and talking in French to his friends. It took me a couple of minutes to shake that one off, but I remembered lob’s traffic affirmations a bit later and said to myself “He was rude, but he didn’t actually hurt me. This is just a stressful part of the city.” I spent the next couple of blocks looking up and watching the signs instead.

This goal isn’t to just not freak out in Times Square [which is inevitable—it’s just an annoying part of town], it’s to not carry that stress home with me, and I am pleased to report that I managed to get back to normal as soon as I got on the subway. I really enjoy seeing the range of people on the subway when it’s full but not packed, so I concentrated on that and shook off the rude guy. Of course, now that I’ve written down all of this, I’m made at rude tourists again, but whatever. It’ll go away again.

and as I was walking through Times Square, I saw a group of bagpipers playing on a traffic island in the middle. The absurdity totally lifted my mood… I need to find more moments like that!

Lately I’ve been freelancing out of the house, and my commute takes me from a busy part of New York smack into the busiest part of New York—Times Square. I have three blocks where I run the tourist gauntlet [within one crosswalk I veered around a guy on a skateboard and a pair of grannies with walkers]. It’s really easy for strangers to be rude when you’re packed in together like that, and while wishing bad things on rude strangers might have been an acceptable form of woolgathering when I ran into one rude stranger a week, now it’s just smearing the stress from Times Square across all the rest of my commute. Last week I was annoyed with a woman who asked me for change while I was on the phone, a guy who marked me for a tourist and tried to sell me a bus pass, another woman who ran out the turnstile after someone else had swiped and those uncountable crowds of people staring up when I’m late for work. Even writing that out hurt.

I need to let this all go, rather than getting worked up about it. It’s a great view twice a day! I also need to find humor in those three blocks of mess, since there’s no way around them…