Today I had a chance to practice what I preach. And what I preach is patience, compassion, and tolerance. And today I had all three of those attributes tested over and over, it seemed.
It started out like this: I'd been talking to our commercial real estate agent about leasing office space in a large building next door to our treatment program. It was a perfect space, 4000 square feet. The dark brown carpet was in great shape, and clean. The entire space was protected with a sprinkler system. It had plenty of parking for the purpose we planned to use it: an extension of the group rooms for our treatment program.
In my mind's eye, I was already signing on the dotted line for whatever kind of lease the agent wanted. From the way he started, it seemed like he was pretty flexible. He said we could lease it month-to-month or by the year. His company was even willing to make modifications to the building so it would satisfy our needs. But then, all of a sudden, for some reason I didn't understand, he told me that he would need to talk to other people on his staff. That his company had hopes of leasing the entire 60,000 feet to one company. Whereas, if he leased us the 4000 feet that we'd hoped for it could create problems for his company if they were dealing with future prospects that might want the whole building to themselves.
I have to admit that I was disappointed about not being able to obtain the lease. However, downtown Mesa is surrounded with other buildings and surely we would be able to find something else. And the one message I try to give everyone in our program is that patience truly is a virtue, because when we are patient it keeps the stress down.
Then the next thing that tested my patience was a real estate deal that fell through. It wasn't necessarily anyone's fault, but for some reason I had high expectations that I would be picking up the check today. I felt disappointment come over me when that didn't happen. I quickly reminded myself that probably 50% of the deals that I try to put together don't work for one reason or the other and to move on to the next person who might be interested in the property.
Then the last thing that happened was for me probably the worst one of all – a computer glitch because of a virus that got into my laptop. I had just spent much of last week having my patience tested by having both of my computers crash. Then today someone who works for me sent me a link that had a virus associated with it and all of my accounting software crashed. Talk about being pissed off for a minute. But instead of being angry for more than a moment, I mapped out a solution that I'm going to put into place this weekend and rebuild the program.
One of the things I've learned in the 31 years I've been sober is the problem with getting angry is that I just have to get happy again. So I might as well take a shortcut and stay happy. After all, I got sober to be peaceful and happy – not angry and frustrated. And I do my best stay that way.
No comments:
Post a Comment