Grumpy

“We cannot always control everything that happens to us in this life, but we can control how we respond.” ~ L. Lionel Kendrick

Today is a fabulous day, I am in the flow and things are going well.  Yesterday I was a "Grumpy Gus" and not feeling the love.  It wasn’t a terrible day and nothing major happened, but lots of things weren’t going the way I expected them to go.  Things were taking way longer than I was planning and other people were adding things to my plate and I was thinking “Hey it’s my April – I’m on "inner vacation" and no one else is allowed to add things to my plate.” I was not living in the present moment and I was not accepting life as it was happening.
 
So I was aware I was grumpy – it is my choice to be grumpy and the awareness that I was choosing to be grumpy made me stop and ask myself if I wanted to continue to be grumpy or return to the joy and bliss I naturally feel in life.  When I am having a hard time, I ask myself the following questions:

• What am I supposed to learn from this?
• How can I reframe this situation?
• Do I want to hold on to this negative energy or move on and let it go?

 
For me, this was another reminder that I am not in control of what happens in life.  This was not how I was expecting my April to go, but I surrendered to this was what is happening and maybe it will work out even better.  I looked at the situation from the other people’s perspective and saw that they were really in need and I wanted to help them out.  I reframed the situation to say that every day I am doing a “chore” on my to do list (i.e. organize closets, spring cleaning tasks, yard work) and this is just a different chore and one that will benefit others. Negative energy is wasted energy in my mind, so letting my frustrations go made things so much better and I had a good nights sleep and today was a glorious day.
 
We are all going to have things happen in life, some will be the big things and others will be the trivial day-to-day things.  We get to choose how we react.  It is always crucial to remember that we are not in control of what happens everyday, but we are responsible for how we respond and it is a choice. And we get to choose whether we make it consciously or unconsciously.
 
Think of a recent situation that was frustrating.  What could you learn from it?  How could you reframe the situation and look at it from another perspective?  What is the benefit of holding on to the anger and frustration or letting it go?

How can let go of the little things in life with more ease in the future?