Our emotions give us choice!
Our house has four bathrooms. That is not always a blessing. Remember that I have seven (7) boys.
Five months ago for some reason we weren’t able to get any hot water in our bathroom. The hot water worked everywhere else in our house – just not in my bathroom – the one connected to my bedroom! We tried everything we could think of (and my husband is quite a handy person) to fix it, but could not figure out what the problem possibly could be. It just made no sense.
Now what on earth would that have to do with emotions, you might ask? Well, I’ll tell you. I’m passionate about emotions, and I do believe that everything is connected in some way to our feelings and thoughts.
I could have chosen to take a shower every morning in my bathroom, freezing in the cold water, thinking about how hard of an experience this was, and how miserable I was. We could have spent a lot of money trying to fix the problem – though it simply was not a logical problem to even happen in the first place. But instead, we chose to “deal with the problem” by simply taking a shower in one of our other bathrooms. That was a little bit of an inconvenience, but it worked, and we went on with life and all was well.
The point is that in terms of emotions, we can do the same thing. We do have other choices with our emotions. We can choose what we want to think and feel, and we don’t have to choose to simply endure the emotion, just as I didn’t have to choose to take a cold shower every day to remind me that we had a problem.
Now the interesting thing – my in-laws came to visit two weeks ago. My father-in-law is a very knowledgeable builder and carpenter extraordinaire. So we asked him to give us his ideas about how to fix the water problem. He spent time looking at things, and analyzing, and in the end, he will tell you that he didn’t know what the problem was, and didn’t know how to fix it.
The funny thing is that right after they left our town, our shower worked. We now have hot water – and cold water. Relating it to emotions – often we have people come in our lives who simply give us a different perspective and validate our original feelings. (Yes, we do have a right to feel puzzled about our water problem.) That is often the only solution we need to have our problem solved. So – to my wonderful father-in-law —- thank you! Thank you for helping us to resolve our problem peacefully – without any stress! That allows us to have our full range of emotions – both hot and cold – and be able to control the temperature in between in terms of how we feel!
