I am starting to become frustrated with how easily our society complains. About everything. Collectively-I'm not just pointing my little finger at you, because we all know how that pointing thing works. Three are looking right back at me.
As I'm looking forward to starting work here in a week, I am overcome with what I consider to be severe anxiety. I tend to always fill my plate to the brim at a buffet and manage to never be able to finish it all. I do the same thing in life.
This Fall term, I now have both my full-time teaching position at a university that won't be named due to public forum and my fear of stalkers, but I also took on a part-time teaching position at a community college. Teaching 6 classes is apparently much more than the 4 I was teaching before. Especially when they were all the same time duration and all the same subject at the same location. No big. I've added a different subject, 2 different textbooks (not by choice) and my classes range from 1 hour sessions to 3 hour sessions. Currently, my Monday has me teaching from 8:30AM and ending at 9:00PM at night...in a town that still fords me a delightful hour and a half commute home.
The thought alone makes me want to curl up in a ball and turn on Oprah. So that's just what I did.
Apparently Oprah's show was not inundated by the jovial demeanor of her premiere this past Monday where she'd selflessly surprised her entire studio audience with a free trip to AuuussTRAAAALLLiiiiaaaaaa!!!! And her favorite white guy John TraVOOOOlllttaaaaa, was also not there piloting the plane as we was on Monday.
Instead, 4 segments featured families/people who were suffering from the most traumatic of situations that they'd ever been in their lives:
1) 2 men held hostage just 2 weeks ago at Discovery and how they made it out alive.
2) The family of a woman who had strangled her 2 baby boys, placed them in car seats and then drove them into a river. Of course she's still alive.
3) A man who's 2 little girls and wife were murdered in front of him and he was the only who was able to escape and make it out alive.
4) The story that hits closest to home, because it's happening in my home, Kyron Horman's poor parents going on their third month of having no idea where their sweet little boy is.
These are real problems.
I turned off the set, looked next to me at my pile of textbooks and daunting computer screen with the ever-so-annoying blinking cursor. Ain't lookin so bad after all...
Really?? I have absolutely nothing to complain about. Here I am sitting in this beautiful condo with everything I could want and much more than what is necessary, stressed with the pressure of 2 jobs in an economy that has most people without employment at all. Not okay.
It's all about reframing what we might think is initially problematic or what triggers our stress-o-meter and then thinking, is this really cause for complaint? Or am I just a lucky bastard to be breathing? Sometimes it is...and I get that. But let's not let the Debbie in us get us down about things that are actually our fortunes.
Who knew I'd turn into an optimist....
Thanks Oprah.
(I was at the Academy Awards when this picture of O was taken. Another reason I can't complain. I've been to the Oscars.)
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