Being True – Bringing it together
Friday morning I went out to my car to go to CrossFit. Flat tire. I had other plans which Life had just thwarted. Not happy. Drove 4 blocks to a service station, parked, got the spare tire out, tried to make the new-fangled jack work. Hmmmm. Two young guys, taking pity on me, changed my tire. Thank you. Feeling better. Oooops – spare tire is flat. Back to not happy. Two young guys left me with the flat spare tire. Air machine at the service station took my quarters, failed to work. Called towing service. Waited 30 minutes, fuming at Life for making me miss CrossFit, and for having to deal with a situation that was inconvenient, costly, and out of my expertise.
Two hours after the initial lifeshock of seeing my flat tire, I'm sitting in the tire store lobby, looking at everyone else waiting, texting, talking on the phone, reading … wishing my life was not this. Then I had a moment of clarity – I can be true to myself, true to others, and true to this specific circumstance – even if I didn't ask for, nor want it to be the way it was.
So I chose to be a "point of peace." I still didn't know what this set of experiences was all about, and I didn't need to know. All I needed was to be mySelf – a point of peace. I imagined my point of peace emanating outwardly from me to everyone there, and then further out into the tire store. In the end, it doesn't matter if I had any affect whatsoever on anyone else or the tire store. What matters is that I embodied a point of peace.