A few days ago, in the office, I felt something irritating my eye and I tried ignoring it. When that didn’t work I tried rapid blinking. Pretty soon after, the discomfort consumed my attention and so after some intense mirror work, prodding, cotton-swabbing and eye-dropping, the culprit, a tiny filament of fiber was located and removed. As I got back to work, my eye insisted that something else was still there. So back to the mirror and I started over with another round of prodding and peering which yielded nothing.
There was nothing in my eye. However, the discomfort was very real. Eventually, it disappeared.
It suddenly occurred to me there are two types of memories of irritations.-
The physical kind similar to the dust fiber leaving a discomfort after its removal. The bumps and scratches which leaves scars after the physical healing. Something in physical form confirmed their ending which helped us moving on.
What about the impact of emotional irritations? I realized so many of the opinions and judgments I have about people and life are made during moments of irritation. But instead of bearing with the discomfort and letting them disappear, they become ‘real’ for me and as the irritation festers the memory of the irritation ceased to be a memory but instead a foregone reality.
From the slow cashier to the waitress at yum cha, my parents, my sisters, colleagues, my dog, friends, ex-boyfriends and husband no one is truly free from clocking up memories of irritations! I realized even with people I love, our relationships are still cast in many different shadows borne from big and small moments of irritations because I never gave them the space to disappear.
I felt sad for what was and yet happy for what can now show up in all my relationships. I will no longer give credence to these amorphous memories of irritations and allow them to separate me from others, especially when it comes to the people I love and care about.
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