Letting Go

I read once that stress is the emotion caused by the particular event. Anxiety is the emotion that lingers after the stressful event. In truth, I probably get depressed more from anxiety than from stress incidents.

I have a lot of frustration in my job and am really confused about what I want in my future, so I went and applied for a mentor at work. I hate to say that our first meeting was a venting session for me. I was really frustrated over the inefficiencies in the processes. A task that should only take one hour actually takes seven hours. There is no budget to develop the simple solution to resolve this, so we end up working overtime to get the task finished.

My mentor told me that I needed to accept that certain situations are not controllable and I need to learn to let go, especially if I already approached my manager about it. In instances where there might be an ethical issue, I can go to other experienced managers for advice. It’s hard to let go of issues on the days that I had to wake up at 5am and roll over to my laptop to start work immediately. But I do realize that there are about five other major time-consuming projects that I could concentrate on to fix other parts of the process. It didn’t help being bitter about loosing this one or many of the other battles. I guess life is about knowing which battles you can win, and just letting go of the ones you cannot. Plus it’s not like I’m married to my work. I think I’ll find another position soon.

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them. - Epictetus