Gratitude is a choice. You can’t change history, but you can change the way you feel about the people and events in your past.
I was angry and hurt that, after 20 years of loyal service, the Brits laid me off from CMP on Oct. 2, 2001. I ran an annual item in my blog complaining about the layoff for almost as long as I was employed, then stopped running it.
[By the way, I never once indicated empathy for the hundreds of others laid off that year in the Dot.Bust―now I do feel empathy.]
I realized the layoff was a golden opportunity to take up the family tradition of teaching. There are 1,000 students out there whose lives I changed (slightly) by doing a good job of teaching them 8th grade U.S. History. In decades of journalism, no one ever said to me, “You’re doing God’s work,” but now, even a decade after I retired, parents and students still stop me on the street and say that.
I am now grateful to CMP for laying me off.
As a result of some spiritual experiences, I re-examined all the people and events in my life that I had hated, and realized they were actually good for me. It’s true: hating someone is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies. Shoveling all that hatred and anger out of my heart improved my cardiac, mental and physical health.
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(From THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO)(gutenberg.org) Chapter 52. Toxicology “Well,” replied Monte Cristo “suppose, then, that this poison was brucine, and you were to take a milligramme the first day, two milligrammes the second day, and so on. Well, at the end of ten days you would have taken a centigramme, at the end of twenty days, increasing another milligramme, you would have taken three hundred centigrammes; that is to say, a dose which you would support without inconvenience, and which would be very dangerous for any other person who had not taken the same precautions as yourself. Well, then, at the end of a month, when drinking water from the same carafe, you would kill the person who drank with you, without your perceiving, otherwise than from slight inconvenience, that there was any poisonous substance mingled with this water.”