Have you ever noticed how quickly responses come our way when they are of the critical variety?
Take for example that billing company or retail store that frequently botches routine things on their end when it comes to basic communication and follow-up courtesy calls, suddenly doing an about face and conducting themselves as reliably as “Old Faithful” spouting its mist right on cue at Yellowstone National Park.
Just for our sake as valued customers, you can bet, they won’ t miss a beat when it comes to any of us being a day late on our payments—they are ON IT and ready to freeze our accounts.
Truly–If speed and convenience are the true calling cards of this information age—well then surely the world’s favorite engine to drive it all by far is the one fueled by critical intention.
While good news gets hastily delivered in an emoji or 3—that same person will definitely take time out of their busy day to tell you that your shirt has a missing button or there is a misspelling in your title page.
The more specialists we have around us, and the more means of disseminating information—the more harassed and behind the 8 ball we feel. “Attention your google account is almost full!” “Your online order was cancelled” “Did you know your dog’s Bordetella shot is overdue at the vets?”
And as consumers—we begin to echo back the same negativity the more we are in its spiral. How about the feedback when it comes to some email or Facebook comment you made? Apart from the perfunctory “LIKE” button pressings–You don’t typically hear the upbeat, creative response as much as you hear the “pesky Gnat” responses of “Did you mean to include this person in your message?” or “Did you mean to tag whatshername?”
And this is occurring even when we steer way clear of the hot button issues like religion, politics—or the hybrid of those two subjects—-SPORTS.
Sure enough, here come these predictable people, emerging out of their little holes, to reach out briefly, and point out that some discrepancy was noticed, and they happen to possess the correct knowledge or resource for making it be done so much better.
We know what they will say before they utter a sound!
No time is spent to help of course in which the other party can delve in and solve our problems so cleverly with no emotional investment of their own to risk.
Reporting the negative only is unfortunately, the SYSTEMATIC way of the world. I mean who has time to make a website comment to a company that delivered the goods to you faster and more efficiently than you could have originally hoped? No one. The comment and feedback sections are almost exclusively reserved for frustrated and trapped people full of despair, stuck inside the vagaries of the bureaucracy. So, when we see questions like “Was this HELP SECTION helpful?” we want to lash out with full lung power—-“NOOOOOOOO!” I still can’t access anything!!”
And this tendency is compounded in today’s information age with all of its anonymous ways to fire back emotional feedback without any embarrassment directly from the person you are criticizing.
“One step up and two steps back” seems to be the perennial dance number we are forced to enact most every day of our lives in this modern world.
The important manuscript that we send out to a host of our favorite people still comes back as “message undeliverable.” The closure we thought we got faxing some important document to our place of work ends up being reversed when we get a secretaries call 2 weeks later—-“We never got that contract you were supposed to send.”
So, in conclusion, in order to not discourage a reader or lead one to conclude that I am a downright downer with a defeatist attitude—I urge all of us to continue to fight the good fight in the spiritual trenches we find ourselves in during this long running epidemic.
If our brain has become trained to only recall the bad news—like only remembering the grocery trip when the check-out line was long rather than when we slipped in and out like we led a charmed life—then we need to slow down a bit more in order to smell the roses.
This means, abandoning our cell phones, and letting the maddening noise of TV news and internet feeds go on without us for a few days at a time.
It is certainly much easier to NOT feel overwhelmed when we don’t revolve around the continual debates and talking points that the world wants to hem you in with.
It is a tough habit of course to do this. I still have the same muscle memory to continually click my TV remote control button to ESPN long after the professional sports went away—much like the guy who vainly keeps flicking his light switch in the midst of a black out—in the hopes that it will be different the next time.
“How can I exist without a game score update?”
And maybe, just maybe, we can clear our brain back to the things we can control a bit better like dressing in the morning, fixing coffee and reading a good book.
Eventually we can hopefully restore our perspective to the point that when we take a deep breath and meditate—we can finally feel at peace instead of still thinking about something or someone that upset us.
Once the “one step up and two steps back” dance is circumvented, we might just start noticing the fun little things around us again like the sweet messages someone wrote on some peace stones during a walking trail—or the great exchange we just had with the next door neighbor.
Who knows? We may start sprouting our own PEACE STONES thoughts like “have you ever noticed what a friendly neighborhood this is?” or “Man, I’ve sure got a blessed life.”
It is my fervent prayer that we may end up being our own best friends and HELPERS in this way.
Until we actually get to the point where we don’t even NOTICE if the news is negative or not!
John Watts 