When I was a little boy, around 3 or 4, when we would go to church on Sundays my mom would bring a little bag of Cheerios for me to munch on to keep me quiet. I always looked forward to that little bag of crunchies. I can still remember asking my mom if she had brought them along as we went to get into the car.
I went rockhounding a few months ago all by myself. It was a long drive from coastal San Diego out to the desert and I had brought myself a bag of Nature's Most Perfect Food to snack on while I drove. By the time I was halfway through the bag, it occurred to me that I was distracting myself with these crunchies just like I had done with the Cheerios years and years ago. It was a really cool moment to recall those memories.
Yesterday, I sat in the back of the room during the last part of our off-site meeting. It was the end of the one I described previously where I had played the role of the grumpy crank. As I sat back there I played solitaire on my PDA. It dawned on me that my PDA had taken the place of the Cheerios and I was distracting myself to prevent another verbal outburst of irritation. I've used the PDA like this for years, but I never realized that what I was doing was social self-preservation. The solitaire game served to suppress my darker, nastier side and prevent comments in meetings I would later regret.
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