Put a lid on it

One time, when I was struggling with relationship dynamics understood only by those who are, or have been, 11-year-old girls, my grandmother gave me this advice…

“You’d better put that in a box on a shelf, because it’s not doing you any good to think about it.”

Being the relentless pursuer of analogies that I am, I have looked at that advice from every angle.

I’ve thought that a more modern grandmother might have said, “let’s talk about these issues and work through them together.”

I’ve pictured myself many times 11-years-old wandering the storeroom of my spirit in a maze of shelves bowing under the weight of woe-filled boxes.

I’ve even credited that advice with my acute sense of inner space management that empowers me to decide what to keep and what to let go.

Regardless, the idea of compartmentalization has merit. When I had to get back to a major project at work after my mother died, I became the queen of emotion warehousing. I contained my heartache during the week so I could work and parent without the risk of interrupting bouts of uncontrolled sobbing. Then, on Saturdays when my children were with their father, from whom I was separated at the time, I would take out my sorrows and revel in them. I cried for hours on end. Just to offer professional validation here in case someone is tempted to tell me how unhealthy I am, my psychologist said that was an excellent practice. If I had locked the grief compartment or refused to acknowledge its presence, that might not have been so good. But it helped me get by and at the end of one Saturday, I realized I had worked through most of the raw emotion in that box and it was now the ready repository for joy.

Grandmother and me

But back to grandmother’s advice…when we feel beaten up by crumby situations in our lives, it is often our innate desire to share them with any one willing to listen.  I think of Shrek’s line “Better out than in, I always say.”

While he was referring to burping, the mental burps that get the garbage out of our spirits can have an equally positive impact on our health. Or so it sometimes seems, initially. On deeper reflection (danger Will Robinson, she’s reflecting deeply!) I am not sure those emotional eruptions or “visits” with friends are really that healthy.

For example—when I am able to sort out emotion from fact, present moment from future fear and personal injury from mere circumstance, I find myself in a very peaceful and composed place. And I can get there, for the most part, single-handedly. While it’s helpful sometimes to have a friend sort out the pieces of my conundrums, it isn’t always necessary. I can get to the reasonable spot inside myself where I can practice what I know to be true and put myself back in order. Lately, I’ve been there for the most part…that peaceful reasonable place.

Then it happened.

I decided to dump my troubles on an unsuspecting trio of acquaintances who’ve no idea how neck deep in alligators I feel right now, and before you know it, I’d colored the entire environment with Mimi’s muck. They were nice enough about it. Their sympathy was sincere, but really, it wasn’t necessary. I would have been much better off soaking up the moment with them and their balancing perspectives about a book we are all reading. I think that’s what Grandmother was trying to tell me. Sometimes, the world really is better off without hearing my woe.

If it’s worth hanging onto it’s worth doing something about, if you can’t do something about it, let it go.

So I say time and again about all negative emotions—anger, guilt, resentment. But letting it go should be a silent operation…or accompanied by a primordial scream in the privacy of your own home or auto…or under the guiding influence of a good therapist. When we constantly talk about what’s wrong, we create a little cloud around us that contains the pollutants of worry and want instead of peace and abundance. That’s the air we breathe and the view we see. Often, we think of our emotional environment as created by external forces, but friends, we have met the smokestack and it is us!

To take the peace you can find inside and wrap it around you in demeanor, conversation and contemplation doesn’t mean you have to behave like a Zen robot. It means you are offering gentleness and grace to yourself and to the world. It’s not just that you choose to put the negative things in a box because you can’t deal with them. You choose to deal with them by putting them in a box.

Letting go—as I recommended earlier—is a tougher job. I personally, have a very hard time forgetting injustices or troubling memories. Forgiving them comes quite easily, but the brain scrub to get them out entirely is usually beyond my power. I can, however, put them in a box labeled, “matters that don’t matter” and put it in long-term storage.

So, there you have it, Grandmotherly wisdom reigns supreme again. We could get into quite a dialog about what to do with boxes when the lids get blown off by new circumstances; recurring themes of containment crisis; how to kick butt effectively when the emotion is worth “doing something about”…but all that is for later conversations I think. Right now. I’m going to go peacefully run my errands and embrace the day. How about you?

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