You can’t do this, but you can do that

Who owns your time right now?

8 years ago a coworker offered a wise perspective on this that I frequently look back to: “whenever you’re thinking about challenges with people or things you cannot control, they own your time.”

I’ve had to work with a few local businesses this month to take care of some personal matters. While most have been responsive, one whose services I am in particularly urgent need of suddenly stopped all communication despite my attempts to reach out.

One part of me wants to lament about the situation and to interpret it in a thousand unhelpful ways: shouldn’t it be the business proactively reaching out to customer, not the other way around? If the business is too busy or does not want my business, I’d much prefer they tell me instead of wasting my time.

These perfectly valid feelings and thoughts given the circumstances, but it also makes me think of my coworker’s advice:

Time and attention are our most valuable assets. I’ve given — perhaps wasted — a lot of this asset on this situation already. Why would I give them even more of it by way of lamenting about the situation further?

In the Buddha’s popular parable of two arrows, he states that the first arrow is the pain directly from the event itself — or in this case, the immediate, jerk reaction of frustration. The second arrow is our lamenting about the event which amplifies the pain. The first arrow might be unavoidable but the second arrow, the Buddha suggests, is often optional.

To help your mind avert the second arrow, consider describing the challenging situation you’re going through in the following terms: I can’t do this, but I can do that.

I can’t control whether or not the business will respond to me, but I can look at their competitors or focus on other tasks I need to get done.

You can’t control when you’ll get that piece of important information you’re waiting for, but you can get to that other project on your list in the mean time.

Where there is helplessness there is often opportunity nearby to focus your energy on other meaningful things. You can’t control everything, but you can control somethings. By locking onto what you can control, you assume — or in some cases, reclaim — ownership of your time and you dodge the second arrow.