Learning acceptance

        In the afternoon I went out to the drug store and picked up some essential items, then spent some time in the cosmetics aisle playing with colors and picking out some new nail polish ("Nova") and a tube of mascara almost exactly the color of my hair ("Space," for some reason). I went to the grocery store and bought food for dinner, including salad bar salads. Bob got garbanzo beans, peas and baby corn, and I got artichoke hearts and vinegary cherry peppers. And a whole spiced peach, which caused the check-out clerk to do a double-take and ask me what it was.

        When he punched my salad bar card, he punched it an extra time because, he said, he didn't like to send me off with just one punch remaining. And then on my way home I saw the most amazing sunset. It looked like the sky was on fire, with the bottoms of the clouds a fiery orange and the top edges gilded with the remaining sunlight. I sang along with the radio and felt blessed.

        The other side of the coin is that it doesn't take much to make me unhappy, either. The computer that I had agonized over sending out to be repaired is broken again, and I'll have to send it out again tomorrow. And why is it that once things start to go wrong, everything seems to go wrong? It was sunny when I dressed this morning in shorts and t-shirt, bitterly cold once I left the house.

        The hostess at the restaurant where I went to have lunch made me wait, and wait, looking past me, until it finally dawned on her that I was alone: "Just one?" The waitress was rude and indifferent. I didn't have any small bills for a tip and had to go back to the table after I paid the check, the wrapped peppermint from the bowl near the cash register fell apart into the street when I unwrapped it, and it started raining the minute I stepped outside.

        Maybe it's just that I'm more aware of the things that go wrong when I'm unhappy. If all those things had happened yesterday, I would have shrugged them off and smiled through them. There's nothing else you can do, anyway.

        And yes, it's just things, and shouldn't be so important. I wish that things weren't so important to me. But we have to have them, don't we? We have to have clothes, and cars to drive, and a place to live. We have to have the tools we need to do our jobs, and we might as well choose things that will please us, that will make us happy, if possible. Sure, I could write with a pencil and a newsprint pad, but not as easily, and not as happily.

        After I complained about having to be without my computer yet again, someone wrote and said that it was okay to complain, that my frustration was understandable. We shouldn't have to worry about the tools we need to do our jobs. That we can't get anything done when we're expending our energy trying to make things work. And I guess that's the way I feel about it. It's a tool. It's a somewhat expensive and perhaps indulgent tool, but it lets me be creative. It frees me to write, it lets me keep in touch with my friends, it gives me a creative outlet that I might not seek out otherwise. I like it. It makes me happy. And so I'm utterly and completely frustrated and unhappy when it doesn't work.

        I wish that I could be more serene, more level, less prone to getting upset when things go wrong. More accepting. It doesn't do any good to rail at the universe. Crying sometimes makes me feel better, but it doesn't really accomplish anything. The only thing to be done is to take care of the problem, to find a solution and implement it, to simply make it right. I'm very good at doing that for other people, at identifying a problem and seeing the steps needed to solve it. I'm not very good at doing it for myself, though. I need to learn to step outside my self and view my problems from the outside. Not to take everything so personally. To be a little more relaxed. This is something I definitely need to work on.