one of the greatest minds in our generation, Albert Einstein once said : “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”
if it’s so simple and obvious, why people aren’t succeeding in changing the way they act?
in my life, in most cases, I was afraid that if I will change the way i do something I will end up with an even worse outcome, so i settled with the usual outcome.
for example, my wife tends to be angry very easily, so every time when something wasn’t according to the way she wanted it to be, she would start shouting at me and at the kids, start cursing, and threatening me that :”this is it”, “everything is over”, “you should go and never return”, and so on…
and because I was afraid that our marriage would end…and was afraid for what would happen to the children..I would do the same thing every time : come to her, try to understand why she was so angry, try to explain to her that there was nothing, and she would not talk to me, telling me to ask forgiveness, and we wouldn’t talk for several days with bad atmosphere in the house
I didn’t like the way I acted, but always after a few days the situation returned to be “normal”
a few days ago, it happened again, but this time I understood that I am living under terror, under constant threat that I need to accept everything…and if not…
and I decided that this is something that is un-acceptable to me, that living in this way is actually worse then the other options ( that we would break )
so I acted differently !!!!
I sent her a message in what’s up saying that i’m not willing to live under this kind of terror anymore, that the only way that is acceptable to me is that when we disagree on something we would talk and resolve things, and that in how we currently act, we actually teach our children to do the same, and that i HOPE that she would throw the terrorist inside of her to the garbage and leave the woman I love.
AMAZINGLY, the outcome was totally different : she replied that she understand that she is running a way from every situation she doesn’t know how to handle, and her way to defend herself is to shout & threaten, and from there on a dialog started ! the quarrel ended in less then 1 hour !!! and I think that things would be different from now on, because I was able to penetrate the Armour she built around herself for so many years
so what did I learn:
I learned that I need to realize if a certain outcome is really acceptable to me, and if not change the way I act, because it the current situation remains it’s not worth to maintain it and I actually have nothing to loose
I learned that when I change the way I act/react – the outcome will change, and I think that in most cases it would change for the best, and even if NOT then still it would be better.
I learned that it takes courage to use a different way
and I would start practicing changing the way I act to recurring situations i don’t like their outcome
Life in Tao 