I’ve been dealing with a most ridiculous, and at times comically awful, situation for the last month or so. Yesterday, things came to a head. I won’t go into the details here, but I do wish to share with you my reaction to the situation.

By the time all was said and done, I was absolutely furious. Rage was seeping from my pores; my body was on the verge of convulsion because of how badly I was shaking. I got in my car (slamming the door, of course) and sat and seethed for a few moments more. Then I began to think about how I was thinking and feeling.

Human beings are unique in this respect: we can think about how we think. Because of this, we also get to choose how we react in a given situation. (Read Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl or The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, and you can get more into this.) I had a choice – I could be mad, or I could let it go.

I chose mad.

I sat in my car, and I consciously decided, then and there, that I was going to be mad. This situation was so awful, so asinine, that I couldn’t just let it go! I had to be mad.

With a catch.

I gave myself a time limit (a trick I learned from reading the works of Zig Ziglar). It was 4:30pm – I needed to drive home and spend the evening with my wife. Now why would I make my wonderful wife miserable because I was having such a hard time? I decided I would be mad – for a period.

“Nathan,” I said aloud, “6pm. That’s how long you have to be mad. At six o’clock, you are going to let it go, and you are going to be spend a nice evening with your wife. Until 6pm you can be mad as hell.”

5:15pm

By about 5:15pm, I decided it was too exhausting to be mad. I told my wife what I had done, what I had decided, and she laughed. Her whole face lit up; it was as though a weight had been lifted off of her shoulders, not just mine. She thought that my whole monologue was hilarious, wonderful, and one of the best things that I could have done. We splurged and got pizza, ice cream, tater tots, and ended up having a nice evening together.

Be mad – with a catch.

Go ahead – react appropriately to the situations in your life. Sometimes they stink. Sometimes they really stink. Just don’t live in the garbage. Give yourself a time limit.