That which troubles or irritates you, is your teacher.

That which troubles or irritates you, is your teacher.
All of us have little things that irritate us. That’s human.
As it is human to encounter things that trouble us on smaller and larger scales.
As these items infest our consciousness, they interrupt all that we would prefer to maintain our focus upon.
Instead, these new thoughts start to take hold and consume our presence, changing our internal vibration and distracting us from so many more valuable subjects of our consideration.
But… what if each one of these irritants and troubles are in actuality, teachers, instruments of the universe to intersect with our plans and insert value and lesson to our overall being?
If that that sounds like a convenient summation, perhaps it is. But, however we may choose to interpret the experience, the one variable that remains consistent, regardless of interpretation, is whether or not we are growing from the experience of having been forced to encounter the alternate stimuli that distracted us from what we were most excited to be thinking about.
There are millions of examples of how an irritation breaks your focus. It could be the moment when you have injured or cut a finger, and have to reach into your pocket to retrieve something and suddenly your body jumps in pain. When that finger heals, you discover how appreciative you are that it is feeling better again.
Escalating from the irritation to something troubling, we are swept into a far more intense arena of distraction, and we are finding our thoughts gravitating to concerns that were not present prior to having heard whatever stimulated the troubled thoughts. Those details could eventually cause us to take much more serious action than coping with something irritating. Depending upon how troubling the thought is, it can cause us to completely change our lives, or on a smaller scale, to take personal action that significantly changes a portion of our daily routine.
Lessons in life do not always come wrapped in a neat box with a red ribbon. Often times they are ugly, messy, terrifying, disturbing, unnerving and more. Given that our attitude is the only string we have to play upon, it strikes me that each trouble and each irritation that comes our way is an opportunity for us to grow, whether we want to or not.
Given the alternate perspective, of opting not to grow as a result of one of these stimuli, are we not actually wasting something of value for which we have already paid dearly? If life is short and precious, and a trouble or irritating stimuli comes into our realm and gives us cause to distract from what our valuable time was already focused on doing, if we lose the lesson in the process, then have we not just paid handsomely for something for which we are receiving zero value if we have not at a minimum garnered some lesson from the opportunity?
Value comes in many forms in life, through many vessels. Perhaps we are best served in recognizing that our path in this life is an aggregation of experiences, ranging in subject and value. But if each experience comes with a personal awareness that in our having afforded time to this experience, we are well served to seek compensation for that time expended, then perhaps our overall lifetime net gain appreciates considerably.
Happy Sunday!
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