SUPPRESSED EMOTIONS
Sunday, July 4, 2021
Getting what we want is easy if we don’t want much.
But most of us desire more beyond apparent necessities.
Food, clothing, shelter, safety – but we want the topo of the Maslow pyramid too …
Making more hay, buying more things, and having more friends fulfill the basic needs and build our self-esteem, but alone – they can never be enough. Maslow knew that. You know that. I know it too.
My challenge sometimes is to maintain my positive resolve through the whole day, every day – and that’s made more challenging when someone is a complete moronic idiot at 7 AM on a Saturday, someone two time zones away whose answer was, “Sorry, I totally forgot the time-zone difference ...”
I wonder if there is a reverse pyramid or if Maslow ever contemplated one – going the other way, with the absence of good things. If there were, I’d add, ‘idiots from Toronto who send you two emails and two texts at 7 AM on a Saturday’ …
The challenge was to decide whether I would let the 7 AM inconsiderate jerk ruin my day.
I must say, it put me in a foul mood – and I fought that all day.
Well, I tried to stifle it, but I could not strangle those feelings. Things like this don’t last long – they won’t matter next month, and I won’t remember them a year from now, but in that moment, they drove me to distraction.
I expect I’m not alone in this ‘suppress the emotion explosion’ emotion management.
P.S. to our American Friends, may the 4th be with you – happy 4th!