Failure

I tend to talk a lot lately about all the great things that are happening as I meditate and take actions to improve myself as a person. But every once in a while, I break down and have a failure. Today was one such failure.

I meditated for a couple hours in the morning, but noticed I was more agitated than usual. That's fine, since there's no such thing as a perfect day. Besides, expectations that meditation will "fix everything" will lead quickly to giving up on it. It's never an immediate cause-effect relationship.

After the meditation though, I had to go to the Apple store to get Julia's computer fixed. The screen stopped working out of the blue, with no apparent cause (she hadn't dropped it, etc). I was agitated as I was trying to find a parking spot, because they make you sign up for appointments, and it took 15 minutes to find a spot, making me late. Without turning this into a gripe session (by going over the details), I got pretty worked up when I was talking to the service employees, because they wanted to charge me money for something I felt should have been covered by their warranty. I was angry and I was definitely showing it.

As you might recall, I promised a while back to quit getting angry. This was a clear case of breaking that promise. However, I had time to reflect as the customer service employee took down the computer's info to get the repair started. At first, I thought "Ugh, I failed again. I'm a total failure. All this meditation and self-improvement stuff is crap. I'm just a big phony, talking about all this high-minded love and stuff." That's a pretty typical response for me when I fail. I get pretty down on myself. It usually makes me more agitated, and I "give up" in my mind. The agitation from failing contributes to even more anger, and I see no reason to continue trying to rein it in. The downward cycle continues.

But at some point, I reflected: "I'm angry. That's not what I want to be, but that's ok." I mentally checked it off as a red "x", and then made the commitment to try to move on a bit. It was hard. But then I thought "well, maybe this interaction can still be salvaged. This guy is trying to help. He actually looks a bit scared." I was still angry (with righteous indignation regarding some of Apple's policies) -- there was no doubt about that. But I had a little space to work with.

Towards the end, I decided, there's no point in me sticking to a position just out of principle, or to protect my self-image. I told myself I'm going to at least apologize to this guy for being a jerk. At the end, to finish up the repair process, he stuck his hand out to shake my hand. He was clearly dreading my response, since I had been pretty curt. I shook his hand, and sort of muttered "Sorry I was so grumpy." It was kind of half-hearted, as there was still anger lingering in my mind. He then said he was sorry he had to charge all that money, it's just the policy. I tried to say something else, but it still came out a bit awkward. "Yeah, but I apologize for being so rude. I've just been running around pretty stressed out and stuff." He accepted, but still seemed a bit nervous.

I walked out not feeling so great, and was self-conscious about the things I did (get angry, then apologize). I felt their gaze on my back as I walked out of the store. But once I was outside, I just let it go. "Whatever. Nobody's perfect. Time to move on." From that point onward, I tried to make up for it by giving right of way to others, by asking how other people were feeling, etc. The agitation was (and still probably is) lingering, but I smiled a bit internally when I saw that I at least succeeded in being kinder to others afterwards, without giving in to the lingering anger in my mind.

There are reasons to be optimistic, even about failure.