Someone cut you off? Chill and shrug it off.
Space Between Flight or Fight
There’s a Stoic exercise that when you wake up you should remind yourself that today you’ll be meeting ungrateful people, and that it is impossible to expect a life where everyone or everything is good.
However, for most of us, we meet fire with fire; but anger causes damage more than the circumstance that arouses it in the first place.
Shrugging it off is one exercise to find the space between stimulus and response or the space between flight or fight mode.
So take a breath, pause, and shrug it off.
What if flight or fight is the better response?
If someone is chasing you with a knife or attacking you with murderous weapon, if you have the chance to run away, you should run away.
If you are stuck, you need to fight it out.
You cannot shrug this kind of circumstance away, or else your common sense has failed you.
However, we encounter many “problems” that deserve nothing but a shrug.
Someone cut you off? Shrug it off.
Your boss fired you? Shrug it off.
Your partner left you? Shrug, shrug it off.
You missed the bus or train to work? Better late than never. Shrug it off.
No money? Shrug it off and do something about it.
You feel sad? Ah, shrug it off and remember this too shall pass.
You’re worried? Shrug it off and live in the present moment.
As what Seneca said:
It is likely that some troubles will befall us; but it is not a present fact. How often has the unexpected happened! How often has the expected never come to pass! And even though it is ordained to be, what does it avail to run out to meet your suffering? Perhaps it will come, perhaps not; in the meantime it is not. So look forward to better things.
So, starting from now, deal with your troubles with a shrug. It’s simple but truly powerful.
Written with a shrug🤷♀️ ,
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