Incident Distraction Reaction

We’re spending our day without thinking and then an incident occurs. It could be a child that has fallen off his bicycle and now has gravel in his knee. Or it could be the closing of the department where you have worked for sixteen years. 

Incident Distraction Reaction

Incidents have a way of happening. You’re not expecting them. For the most part. Because we all like our lives to float along without the gods of disaster noticing us.  

If we just continue to do our thing the cake that’s halfway through baking for the first order for your new birthday cake business, would not be a problem. You’d simply turn off the oven and get your gravelly kneed child to Emergency. But that is not how we humans are designed. 

Depending on how the rest of our life is performing, we might grab that son-who’s-just-like-his-crazy-father and scream at his dirt covered face because we are afraid of how much worse it could have been. Or you might raise your zen-like self off your yoga mat and speak in a soft comforting voice. (I'm only guessing that more likely, you’re somewhere in-between.)

Because we’re distracted in the life we’re floating through, don’t forget. We might be busy, but it's our boat, our life, we even believe that we are in control.

Courtesy Pixabay - Ben-Kerckx

Our days are planned, we have a checklist and we’re determined to plug right through. There are things to be accomplished at home, at work, for your aging parents or for your sister who’s finally admitted that her daughter is an addict. When and how can you get your stuff done if you now have to spend two hours in an Emergency waiting room? You get a chance for a reaction.

Whom are you going to call for help?

Then as it turns out, it’s a slow day for accidents and your son realizes that this incident could garner him some ice-cream on the way home and is seen by a Doc almost immediately. And then it's up to you what your reaction will be.

Still or Scream?

A writer I know told me that she did her best writing after her parents died, they were in their nineties. She finally had the freedom to speak from her heart about the dysfunction that lived in the house that she had grown up in.

Still or Scream?  Courtesy Arno_M Pixabay

Someone else said that she found her husband in bed with a girl young enough to be his daughter. She, a seemingly contained person, walked into the closet they shared and cut up every one of his dress shirts. They became all short-sleeved. Then she went to the kitchen and made a list of what she’d take in the divorce.

Why is it that we need a catastrophe of some sort, in order for us to abandon our limits and to tell the truth? Our feelings belong only to us, we need to recognize that when they start rattling us that they are telling us something. They are trying to get our attention by making us uncomfortable. We don't need to wait for a disaster.

No one, not even those who know us the best can understand our deepest emotions. They have not lived each day in our skin. They have not hidden in corners with our tears or laughed with us in the darkness at what we consider the absurdity of life.

One of our biggest fears, unfortunately, is what would happen if we were to be “too honest”. If we actually told the ones who offend us how much they annoy us or that we see through their lies. Because we are for the most part governed by good manners and kindness even when we walk away in frustration. 

We don’t want to be the bad guy. We don’t want to be the one who is perceived as mean. Although through experience most of us know that sometimes being direct, by being brutally honest is the only way to save our selves.