That Damn Book

I swear that if you don't think you have anything to work on just go to a literature meeting. 
Our books are jam-packed with irritating stuff.

I'm currently frustrated because I'm so out of the loop as far as my father is concerned.  Things are happening and I'm not hearing about them, constantly putting me a couple of steps behind in the unraveling.  It's not that my input isn't properly valued - it's that my input, apparently, isn't an issue at all.  It's not that I'm being excluded from the process, as if I don't care about what's going on, it's that I'm ignored when I try to get some basic information.

What is it I say all the time?  You're not being helpful if no one wants the help that you're offering?  I always come back to the fact that I'm the guy that left the area.  If I wanted to be right in the thick of things I should have stayed in the thick of things.  I took a long hike SuperK yesterday on an island that sits about 25 miles offshore from Vacation City where a small fox the size of a house cat tried to drag her backpack into the bushes.  That's what I chose to do, not stay in close proximity to my often irritating relatives back in The Old City.  This is not bad and this is not good - this simply is.

So on Monday we read To The Family Afterward.  Today the group leader chose a few paragraphs from How It Works, another chapter in our annoying literature, which was very helpful because I only have the slightest familiarity with how anything works.  "The first thing apparent was that this world and its people were often quite wrong.  To conclude that others were wrong was as far as most of us ever got.  The usual outcome was that people continued to wrong us and we stayed sore.  But the more we fought and tried to have our own way, the worse matters got."

The thing that resonates with me is that the solution to every problem that I have is within me. That doesn't mean that other people can't wrong me and that I won't get angry about it, it's that I get to choose how to respond to it.  I may not like what's going on but I can react to it well or I can react to it poorly.

Nobody is thinking about me.  Nobody is doing anything to me.  They're simply doing things.