It's not what happens, it's how you feel about it.

“Just wanted to say in my opinion this has to be one of your best, if not your absolute best, emails.” ~ Paul G.

A genuine little reminder for you today, because it’s so easy to forget:

So obvious, and yet so easily overlooked.

Taken to the extreme, the most “terrible” thing could happen to you… and yet you could be completely fine with it.

I’m not saying you will be—our conditioned responses can be pretty sticky!—I’m just pointing you to the fact that these two things, below, are not the same!

And I have drawn two distinct lines, with a gap between them, for very good reason.

👨🏻‍🏫

Dark times

Years ago, back when I was on my way out the door from Clinical Surgery, I’d quit my training post and was amassing as much money as I could (before becoming technically unemployed) by doing various locum surgical jobs.

This meant travelling to all sorts of hospitals I’d never worked in before and being thrown in at the deep end, plugging gaps in the rota for staff who were off sick, or on leave.

It paid really well and good job too, because I can’t recall a single shift where I wasn’t covering more than one absence. In one notable episode I turned up at the Surgical Directorate of a District General Hospital to discover I alone was scheduled to do the jobs of no less than three doctors!!

😱

(I became something of a local legend, that week. The overwhelming majority of ward staff took pity on me, and went out of their way to avoid bleeping me, unless it was absolutely necessary.)

But being on call overnight, in an unfamiliar hospital, with unfamiliar staff and unfamiliar patients really was the pits.

It sucked big time.

You’d be utterly shattered… get back to your room, just about get to sleep and then be woken up again by any number of different wards. I didn’t really have much of a sense of humour on such nights, and came close to crying a few times.

Until I caught sight of something in the diagram, above; some truth.

This was decades before I came across the inside-out understanding but intuitively I knew that if I was going to get through these irredeemably dark times (i.e. “The thing”) I would have to do something to alter how I felt about them (i.e. “My experience of The thing”).

These jobs used to get paid at an hourly rate, so whenever I’d go to a new hospital where I knew I’d be on call overnight, I’d take a little calculator with me, and any time the bleep went off and woke me up, in the time before I picked up the phone to answer the call, I would do a very quick calculation of how much money I had just earned for sleeping.

🤑

Such a silly little trick, but it completely changed my experience of “The thing” (which hadn’t changed) and I usually made those return calls with sort of mildly amused, smug satisfaction – my eyes on the prize of why I was putting myself through it in the first place, I suppose.

Isn’t that just “reframing”?

(You say tom-ay-toes, I say tom-ah-toes 😉)

Well, kind of, but there’s something deeper at play, in seeing the difference—and, more crucially, the disconnect—between The thing and Your experience of The thing.

When you’ve seen how “Your experience” is created, moment to moment, from the inside-out, it just takes the pressure off “The thing” entirely.

The two aren’t actually connected (even though it really looks like they are), and you get to a point where you can see what was meant by the spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti, when he was asked what his secret was, and he replied,

“My secret? Oh I suppose you could say that I don’t mind what happens.”

Have yourself a wonderful day.

💟

Giles

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