Wednesday, June 8, 2022

The Zen of Feeding the Birds

A gentleman on the cambridge subreddit is annoyed by his neighbour throwing stale bread into a public garden. My reply:


I found that when I lived in London, I used to get annoyed by the regular rapes and murders. When I moved back to Cambridge, I got annoyed by parking permits and traffic and tourists. When I hid out in Wicken Fen in the perfect peace and stillness of the pandemic, all alone for weeks with nothing to do but read and play chess, I eventually developed an almost magical-seeming ability to get annoyed by birdsong and the sound of the wind in the trees.

There is always something to get annoyed by. Usually the best way to deal with it is to find a way to deal with your habit of getting triggered, which is something that slowly develops like any other habit.

And you can fix that like you can fix any other habit. When rational and calm, work out what someone who wasn't annoyed by that sort of thing would think about your trigger (oh, how kind of that nice man to feed the birds!) , and then practice exposing yourself to the trigger and automatically starting off your desired new thought pattern.

It takes practice, but if you work at it, you'll eventually stop being annoyed. And then you'll have the superpower of being able to live free and calm in a place where annoying things happen.

Followers