The Crossroads of Choice
Dear reader,
We meet countless small frictions each day. A cutting comment. A careless driver. A family jab that lands.
Here is the point: your first surge of emotion is potentially uncontrollable, but your next move is your choice.
Picture a short stretch of road between feeling and acting. A Y crossroads. One path runs downhill into reaction. The other climbs toward response.
I stand there on the regular. I often react, but I’m getting better at finding the pause and choosing to respond.
Today, hearing one human disrespect another, who wasn’t even in the room, simply for having a different sexual preference got to me. My eyes opened, anger built, fists clenched and words queued.
In that tiny pause before squeezing the verbal trigger, I saw the fork. I paused, took a breath and I decided to respond. I picked a question instead of assenting to anger and attacking with outrage and immediate judgement.
I asked “What makes you feel that way?”
The Trick
The tool is simple:
When you start to feel something with intensity. Pause.
Say “this is a surge of emotion”
Feel it, wait until it passes a little
Say “What is up to me here?”
“Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens. Some things are up to us and some things are not up to us. Our opinions are up to us, and our impulses, desires, aversions—in short, whatever is our own doing.” — Epictetus
Try this today
Notice the body first. Tight chest. Hot face. Quick breath. Say, “this is a surge of emotion”(inside voice).
These words creates space.Pause and in the pause take three full breaths. In through the nose. Slow out-breath. Count them.
Ask yourself one orienting question: “What is mine to do here?”
Then do just that.
Progress, not perfection. Train the pause, and the pause will train you.
Thank you for reading
With gratitude,
David
Love is Universal
“We are members of one great body. Nature made us relatives when she begat us from the same materials and for the same destinies.” — Seneca, Letters to Lucilius
