All week I was fighting a grouchy mood. First, it was the heat and how every time you went outside it was like slogging through a steam bath. And then, out of the blue, my back started hurting, and all the plans I had went out the window, and I ended up lazing on the couch and watching TV and reading a book about Buddhist philosophy, which said stuff like
“Struggling with anything to make it be other than what it is creates suffering.”
which hit me hard because lately I’ve realized that a key part of my personality is Wanting to Make Things Be Other Than What They Are.
For example, we have fancy new book shelves at our newly renovated library and I don’t like them. They’re metal and the books slide and fall over and so we have these hook-like contraption things that attach at the back of the shelves to prop the books up, but the problem is it’s hard to maneuver the hook-like contraptions, which might not seem like a big deal, but a substantial part of working at a library is shelving books, and therefore, having to CONSTANTLY MESS AROUND WITH THE HOOK-LIKE CONTRAPTIONS.
I don’t like this, I tell my manager, and she nods and smiles and tries to make me feel better by agreeing that yes, it is annoying, but hey, it’s here to stay, so what are we going to do?
(I don’t know CHANGE IT TO A THING THAT WORKS BETTER?!?!)
But look, I say, it takes longer to shelve now.
Nod and shrug.
But listen, I say, did anyone ask us if we wanted these newfangled, hard-to-use bookends?
Smile and shrug.
Okay, now I realize that I am getting on my manager’s nerves, so I shut up, but inside, I’m thinking: Why can't we change this thing that doesn’t work?
But I don’t say this. I finish up with the $&%^# shelving and head downstairs to my new desk in the youth department, which is smaller than the old desk and three-fourths of the way enclosed so that it is comically cage-like, and now I’m wishing I hadn’t blown all of my goodwill complaining about the shelving.
What is it like, I wonder, as I turn slowly around inside my cage-desk, to be the kind of person
who accepts things the way things are?
the kind of person who steps out into the steam bath and smiles, who nonchalantly notices back pain and finds humor in library renovations, who shakes her head and sighs unquestioningly at the outrageous and horrifying news of the world?
The Buddhist philosophy book has no answers except Don’t be the kind of person that, apparently, I am. Which suddenly makes me think, Wait, shouldn’t I, therefore, accept that THIS is who I am? And wouldn’t it be a type of suffering, too, to wish that I could be a different person?
These questions make my head spin, and spin some more, as I keep turning inside my cage-desk as the patrons spill into the room, the moms and nannies with the baby strollers and the toddlers toddling toward the train table, the school age kids with their summer reading forms and the teenage volunteers.
For the next few hours, I am too busy to whine or worry or question or complain because someone wants help finding a book and someone asks for a sticker and someone has bumped his head and needs the Mr. Smiley Face ice pack and someone has piddled in the baby garden.
There is a lesson here, but I don’t know what it is. Accept the things you cannot change. Or don’t. Be the kind of person you are. Or not. In the meantime, find the book and hand out the stickers, soothe the bonked head and clean up all the piddle.