Patience

There is an interesting Buddhist teaching that goes something like: Whoever is your enemy is your teacher as well. The same idea is expressed many different ways.

This means (to me) that if someone is pissing you off, you have a choice. You either choose to be angry and respond to that person (or situation) with anger; or you choose to not be angry and not respond with anger. So this is the idea that you choose your mind, even if you can't control the situation.

Living in a big city and dealing with big city traffic every day, I get lots of practice. My wife and I are constantly saying, "That guy is teaching you patience," when one of us is getting ticked off.

I'm getting better at it too. Practice makes perfect. I recently bought a new computer. A Dell XPS, a nice little laptop. My teenage son downloaded something to it and must have picked up some malware. Within days problems started multiplying and soon it wouldn't boot. This should have upset me but I tried to look at it as an opportunity. I reloaded the operating system and drivers and it actually runs faster, with less BS software on it. Now I'm glad this happened. I got angry with my son at first, now I wish I had been more patient. Hopefully I will learn.

But overall, I feel like I'm walking around with more of an optimistic attitude. The world is full of doors opening now, rather than doors closing.

And it's all about changing your mind. In reality that's all you control.