Haiku 2023–277

a horrible day

infectious if you let it

take a moment — breathe

— —

We all have bad days — each and every one of us.

We all carry burdens around — some obvious, some hidden deep within the recesses of our soul.

We all have our individual ways of dealing struggles… but some are better than others.

I’ll be the first to admit it — through the first fifty-some years of my life, my tool set for handling adversity was quite limited. My go-to for the longest time involved “hurling things” at my problems, whether in the form of colorful language or actual physical objects. Almost inevitably, this foisted my bad day onto others. No one needs that, they have enough problems of their own.

So, as a self-admitted rageaholic, what do I do about this?

I breathe.

I write this today because I had a moment yesterday when this came into sharp focus. While driving down a fairly curvy road, a warning light came on on my car, something that could have been easily prevented had I followed through with a bit of attention. Having dealt with this problem for thousands of miles now, I didn’t get too worked up about it, but what if I had? What if I let anger and rage foment inside me as I was driving down the road and let my focus stray from driving the car? What if I had not been paying attention to what I was doing as another car came around a sharp curve hugging the center line? What if my “horrible situation” devolved into something much worse, not only for me, but for others because I could not hold my emotions in check?

I’ve mentioned before, I’ve meditated for years. For the longest time, I didn’t know why other than lots of people said it was a good idea. It all came into sharp focus for me a couple of years ago the first time I was able to short-circuit my rage by taking a moment to return to my breath. I’ve been a firm believer ever since. What’s more, I discovered that breathing is good for other emotions besides anger. It has become an invaluable part of who I am.

We all have bad days. We all carry burdens around. We all have our individual ways of dealing with our struggles. Breathing will not solve all your problems, but it’s an excellent place to start.