Unfortunately, Meditation Won’t Make Other People Less Annoying

There's a question that's come up at almost every mindfulness workshop I've done.

Someone will finish a meditation, feel wonderfully calm, and then say something along the lines of:

"This is all very well while I'm sitting here. But the minute I leave, someone's going to say something that annoys me and all of this is going to disappear. Then what?"

And honestly, I get it.

Meditation hasn't magically made everyone around me less annoying.

Unfortunately.

But it has made me think quite differently about how much of my peace I hand over to other people.

For years, one of my biggest pet peeves was people being late.

Actually, who am I kidding? It still is.

I have a friend who is almost always late.

If we decide we're meeting at 1 p.m., I'm going to be there at 1 p.m.

My friend, however, might stroll in at 1:20.

And I'd be furious.

I'd sit there thinking, "You clearly don't respect my time."

Then I'd move on to, "How difficult is it to just leave home twenty minutes earlier?"

By the time my friend arrived, I'd already had an entire argument in my head.

Meanwhile, my friend had absolutely no idea.

Just happily running late.

And eventually I had to admit something rather irritating to myself.

My anger wasn't making my friend arrive any faster.

The arrival time was still going to be 1:20.

So I could spend twenty minutes getting increasingly angry about something I couldn't change.

Or I could order a coffee.

That sounds ridiculously simple.

But for me, it was actually about something much bigger.

Control.

I wanted my friend to behave differently because I would feel better if that happened.

And then I started thinking about myself.

There are things I do that I'm sure irritate people around me.

There are probably things they'd love me to change.

But if I'm not ready to change them, is someone else wanting me to really going to make a difference?

Probably not.

So why did I think my wanting someone else to change should work?

And that's when something started shifting for me.

I realised I was spending a lot of energy trying to control the part of the situation that wasn't actually in my control.

My friend being on time wasn't in my hands.

What was in my hands was what I did with those twenty minutes.

I could sit there getting angry.

I could tell my friend that being kept waiting bothered me.

I could start leaving home a little later when I was meeting this particular friend.

Or I could still arrive at 1 p.m. because being on time matters to me, order myself a coffee and enjoy it.

My friend might still arrive at 1:20 in every one of those situations.

The difference is that I've stopped making my peace dependent on my friend behaving the way I want.

I think that's what letting go of control has started to mean to me.

It isn't about not caring.

And it certainly isn't about becoming okay with everything people do.

Sometimes we need to say something.

Sometimes we need to set a boundary.

Sometimes we need to make a different choice altogether.

But there are also so many situations where I simply don't get to decide what another person does or how something turns out.

And the more I fight that, the more frustrated I become.

What I can decide is what I do next.

That's where the control comes back to me.

Not over the other person.

Not over the situation.

But over my own response to it.

And strangely, accepting that I can't control everything has made me feel more in control, not less.

Because I'm no longer wasting so much energy trying to change the part that was never mine to change.

Some days I'm good at this.

Some days I'm absolutely not.

There are still times when someone does something and every bit of mindfulness I've ever practised appears to leave the building.

But perhaps that's the answer to the question I keep getting in my workshops.

Mindfulness isn't going to stop people from irritating us.

It's not going to make everyone behave the way we'd like them to.

And it definitely isn't going to make my friend arrive on time.

What it has done for me is help me see more clearly what I can change and what I can't.

And sometimes I can catch myself and think:

My friend is still going to be late. I might as well enjoy the coffee.