Seaweed's Greatest Hits

I gave this lead last Saturday night.  Gotta tell ya . . .  I was brilliant.  Funny, warm, clever, smart, wise, and any other complimentary adjectives that you can come up with, and then I actually had to talk in front of the group and all of this brilliance went right out the window and I'm sure I gave a fairly uninspiring and pedestrian talk.  I guess it kept me sober and I didn't see anyone else drink or use during the actual meeting, and that's the low bar we have to get credit for an acceptable talk.

I was walking with a friend who was kind enough to attend the meeting and he asked me how I felt about it.  Fine.  I'm pretty happy with my Program and I'm pretty sure most people are only paying attention half the time and I don't care what anyone thinks, anyway.  It was pointed out early on that the talk is for me, not for anyone else.  It allows me to hear myself say in words to other people what I'm thinking in my head.  The stuff I'm thinking about needs to be out there on the airwaves so that I can get feedback as to the sanity of the stuff.

I asked him what he thought about it.  He made a comment about it being Seaweed's Greatest Hits and he regurgitated some of what I talked about in a manner that struck me in the moment as overly sarcastic.  I've been practicing diligently on a type of meditation called Mindfulness.  I work at it daily.  I find that the benefits are not often apparent during the actual meditation but present themselves later, in instances like these.  My immediate reaction when I believe I'm bring dissed is irritation which morphs quickly into a varying level of resentment, dependant on the level of diss, in this case quite mild.  I understood that he was trying to be funny and that he actually was kind of funny and that the deal was with me, that I was in a spot in the world where it rubbed me the wrong way.  Slough it off.  Then, I acknowledged to myself something that I say to the targets of my wit all the time: If I want to do this I better be able to take it myself.  Nothing worse than someone running their mouth and then getting their back up when the sarcasm comes their way.  Mostly, when I'm annoyed, I cycle through this kind of thinking quickly.  In this case it hung in there for a bit - not a chunk, but a bit - and I was done with it.  I believe I learned something from it or at least revisited a lesson in real time.  It's like my response when someone beeps a horn at me when I think I've done nothing wrong: Irritation or anger, resentment, then who cares?  This happens in a nanosecond most of the time. 

Until it doesn't.