Bamboozled

It’s funny how life provides you with lessons. Lessons and opportunities to practice what you preach.

Yesterday, I pondered attribution and anger and the choice of how to react to something. Today, I have the opportunity to choose my reaction. How should I react to someone violating my home and taking for themselves what does not belong to them? Well, I guess it belongs to them now, doesn’t it? Yes. It does. So, that in and of itself is a lesson on possession. I am humbled at the reminder.

Then there is the matter of what one human being must be going through in order to take from another without asking. What stories does one tell oneself in order to justify such behavior? I feel sadness contemplating such a thing. And I feel a swelling in my heart that is nothing but compassion for that person. Now, at least. Earlier…not so much.

And that brings me to choice again. I choose how to react to this situation. I can choose to allow this to poison my heart against a fellow human being who experiences the same range of emotions I do, who feels hunger and cold and fatigue like I do, who mostly likely simply wants live their life…like I do. Or, I can take it all into account and choose to let my attribution of her action go. I can choose to accept this as not one but many lessons that the Universe has provided to me and allow myself to learn from it, to hear the message that is being broadcast to me.

What was taken never belonged to you. Possession and ownership are just illusions. Compassion for those who suffer is paramount.

I am grateful for the reminders and for the opportunity to choose how to react to the moments in my life that may not always be precisely as I would like them to be.