embrace it

What a grey day. I drive to work because I am too scared to cycle home in the dark with the threat of icy cycle paths. The car radio catapults me straight back to the big old house, dancing on a Thursday evening to Top of the Pops with a toddler on my hip. Oh, the mushy lyrics of 1980s Brit pop. 

It starts to snow, big wet flakes disintegrating on the wet roads. Awful stuff. Waiting at a traffic light, I count how many weeks to midwinter, to spring equinox. I never liked this season. I never will.

Later, R tells me of his new colleagues from far away places who ran outside dancing and shouting while the locals looked on in disbelief. This is not real snow, folks.

Work is a mess, I try and find some balance, try to calm down a few angry moods, try and sort out a chaotic situation that needs more attention than I can offer. For a moment, I want to walk away, banging my door, cursing. But while I could do (and have done so often enough) this at home, the person I am at work would never do anything like it. The person I am at work runs after the angry intern and listens to her complaints and helps her to think she has found the solution all by herself.

On fb I watch Pema Chödrön talking to a dolled up Oprah (what's with that lip gloss?) about opening our heart. Compassionate abiding. Simple.

And in my inbox I find this Pema quote:

In Tibetan Buddhism there’s a set of teachings for cultivating compassion called mind training, or lojong. One of the lojong teachings is, “Whichever of the two occurs, be patient.” This means if a painful situation occurs, be patient, and if a pleasant situation occurs, be patient. This is an interesting point. Usually, we jump all the time; whether it’s pain or pleasure, we want resolution. So if we’re happy and something is great, we could also be patient then, and not fill up the space, going a million miles an hour—impulse shopping, impulse talking, impulse acting out.