Grain of Salt

Remember to “take it with a grain of salt”.

The old saying to “take it with a grain of salt” is useful to me.  When I remember to carry my psychic saltshaker with me AND to use it, I can avoid unnecessary distress to my emotional balance. A simple grain of salt enables me to stomach unsavory, insulting, hurtful, and unwelcome words and innuendos that come my way. It takes away the bitterness so I am less likely to react. The words that spew from someone else’s mouth are coming from their truth, not mine.  I don’t have to swallow the bitter offering, let alone digest it, without neutralizing it to be palatable to my own truth. In a way it’s about accepting someone else’s truth with respectability. I show respect for myself and for that other person.  By practicing using the saltshaker, I will increase my patience with other by not taking things so personally.

The Virtue of Patience

This reminder is about the virtue of Patience.

I constantly lose patience with my partner. His slow speech, the beastly sounds he emits, his frugality, his repetitious stories, his annoyance with me when I interrupt his tedious delivery of information sets my reactor in motion! What can I do? Am I am happy? Is my impatience an indication of dissatisfaction or is it a shortcoming which I must remedy?

He draws his stories out, inputting too many uninteresting details. Can his “Asperger’s”, my diagnosis, be the blame and I, therefore, just have to be the ‘bigger person”? I  dig my fingers into my ears when he loudly slurps his hot cocoa, the sound penetrates through my skin. I wince every time he adds another plastic container or old scrap of something to the growing piles around the house that he thinks may have a future use. I feel sharp pain from the scowl he hurls my way when I interrupt his “dissertation” on the cost savings of not turning on the heat in winter and his calorie per gram calculations to keep his skinny body skinny. I must be patient. I must let it go. I must not take it personally.

Can I? There is something deep within my spirit that is being hurt, past wounds and frayed nerves, I suppose.  Perhaps the prescription is to speak up to unload the pressure that has built up by my irrational fear of communicating my frustrations. Maybe I need to honor my truth through freely and openly sharing it in order for Patience to become a virtue I hold rather than the impediment it apparently has become.