It's just a b*tch to have to use this stuff and be completely responsible for everything in your life - or at least your attitudes toward it.
This week, one of the neighbor dogs broke my dog's leg. Aside from the vet bills, it was a mess for me inside. I know that if you take it out on that neighbor or their dog, it just comes back to you the same. But, damn it's hard to be nice sometimes. I took a good look at it and figured out that the problem was that these dogs were not being trained to get along, but were being their instinctive types. Territorial, car-chasing, obnoxious - you know.
My solution? Start training them. Make friends with them (while my own dog heals up on the back porch) and start training them what nice behaviour is. Being agressive just makes them more agressive, doesn't it? Getting them locked up would just make them locked up, agressive dogs. Look out when ever they are let loose...
One of them is a Lab and the other is a Doberman. Now I know from experience, that both breeds can be the nicest there are. And both can be incredibly dangerous. It's just how they are worked with and so on.
So I started giving them treats - finding that they love to catch them out of the air when tossed. By the second day, I was petting that Lab. She still barked at me, but that is just a bad habit she is going to have to re-learn.
Now - the problem is with the relatives I have around me. Critical comes easier than not, sometimes. Especially if you're trained at it all your life.
The problem is then to hold your tongue and say something nice regardless. Turn that cheek, as the parable says. And that doesn't just take patience, it takes a great deal of practice.
As Wattles and others point out - it helps if you don't work past the point you are physically tired. That's saying a lot when you are on the farm and working to beat a deadline the weather is imposing... Today I fed the cows, got my dog off to the vet (again), fixed a heater for the basement water lines, repaired a neighbor's tool I had borrowed (and broken - oops), got up on the barn roof to replace a stovepipe, then dug a three foot deep, two foot across hole to get a freeze-proof hydrant installed before I lost my warm(ish) mid-winter days - and before I moved some cattle in who wouldneed the water. Then I went to pick up said dog from the vets, as they couldn't keep them over the holidays (and we didn't want to pay for that).
With all that done, I was trying to rest in an easy chair when one of my sisters came in to pick up my niece (who had helped me with the hydrant and picking up the dog). She made a few remarks about how the neighbor dogs had chased her car "all the way up to the house " (a slight exageration). I tried to say something useful, but ended up just tripping over myself and just shut up as a last resort.
And then sat and thought it over and over to see where my own criticism was coming from.
It just "ain't easy". And it certainly isn't "fair". But who said life was either easy or fair? The thing to do is to settle yourself down, learn to create your own peace within, and - once calmed - work out the optimal solution for what you're facing/faced with.
Tomorrow, I've got another grueling 10-hour day (1/2 of my day job "week") and then look forward to a bunch of visitors around the house for the next week. So I'll rest up as much as I can...
But this post is for all of you out there with a lot of STUFF in your life...
- - - -
Some books I've edited and published recently is giving me a great deal of food for thought - as I've put them up on Lulu as beta and am going through the proofing process to get them over to Amazon.
Mystic Marketing Guide - takes up where Online Millionaire Plan leaves off.
and
Genius: How to be one, How to live with it.
Both have some amazing excerpts from the great masters of self-improvement and personal development. Not every day you get to sit at the feet fo the masters - unless you have my job...
But visit my Lulu bookstore and find out for yourself.
And sign up for an online course in the Law of Attraction.
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