Work plays a big part in our life, at least for most of us.  We spend such a large proportion of our time in the workplace that it’s no wonder this particular area can often be fraught with many challenges and grievances.  I’ve spent the best part of the last 25 years in customer service and as anyone else in a similar field knows, it definitely has its fair share of difficulties, particularly when it comes to interactions with other people.  

 

It’s not unusual for me to get the odd disgruntled or rude customer, but there must be something in the air lately because the last few weeks in my workplace have really been something else.  I have experienced more difficult confrontations with people in this time than in the whole last two and a half years combined.  Just what the heck was going on?

 

It all began with a regular customer who had a habit of being quite arrogant and rude, so much so that a colleague had given him the nickname of Grumplestiltskin.  On this particular day he seemed to go out of his way to be extra unkind to me.  My own response was to fire back at him in what I felt was an act of justifiable self-defense.  While the whole incident itself was over in a matter of seconds, I just couldn’t let it go.  I stewed on it in my mind for weeks, thinking about the clever responses I should have made to him, and complaining about him in my head and to others.  I even refused to be the one to serve him whenever he came back in.

 

Being no stranger to A Course in Miracles by this stage, I was well aware of just what it was I was doing.  Intellectually I knew that this was all my own projection, and that this ‘villain’ was just a convenient scapegoat on who I could place the guilt I secretly thought was within me.  I understood, as the Course says, that “as you see him you will see yourself” ( T-8.III.4:2), and that my vicious thoughts were actually only going back to me.  I would go over and over the true forgiveness process that I had grown accustomed to practicing, but yet I just couldn’t seem to forgive this.  I couldn’t bring myself to see this person through the eyes of love.   As much as there was a part of me that wanted to forgive, there was an even greater part that was still insisting on making it real, and it wasn’t going down without a fight!

 

For the weeks following this unpleasant encounter, I began to experience an increase of similarly rude customers, far more than I was used to.  They seemed to be popping up everywhere, and I was more than a little baffled as to why this was so.  One afternoon I was closing up after another run in with a rather impatient gentleman, when it suddenly dawned on me just how I had reacted to each of these ‘difficult’ people.  My response had been automatic.  Extremely automatic.  It’s like I was on autopilot.  Their perceived acts of aggression had triggered something in me and my response had been to put up my defenses and react in kind.

 

It hit me in this moment just how deeply and firmly entrenched in our reactions and habits the ego thought system actually is.  At no point in these interactions was I making an active decision about what my response would be.  I had reacted with zero conscious effort on my part.  My responses had played out as perfectly as if they had been scripted, and of course they had – right out of the ego’s script.  I had been completely swept away by its narrative.

 

The ego is sneaky.  If you don’t keep an eye on what it’s up to, it will jump in first in any situation and use it for its own purposes.  So just what was the ego up to?  Its purpose was to convince me that the whole situation was real and that there was something outside of me, in this case some very guilty other people, that were the cause of my loss of peace.  The ego wanted to keep me mindless, caught up in the world’s drama, so I wouldn’t go back to the mind and choose against this clearly insane narrative.  And boy had I fallen for it!

 

The Course asks us, “do you prefer that you be right or happy?” (T-29.VII.1:9).  I was convinced that these people had wronged me, and I was adamant that I was the one who was right.  I was determined to make them the guilty ones, and all I had done was to make myself absolutely miserable in the process.  My insistence on being right had made me extremely unhappy and I could feel, not only psychologically but physically in my body, the pain and dis-ease that this was causing me.  While it was easy and convenient to blame my reactions and unhappiness on the actions of others, the truth was it was my own decisions that had led me to feel this way.  “The secret of salvation is but this: that you are doing this unto yourself” (T-27.VIII.10:1).

 

But I could also decide again.  I didn’t want to do this anymore, it was exhausting.  I didn’t want to feel this way about others, even if they did appear to be attacking me, because it just made me feel plain terrible.  It occurred to me that the increase in difficult encounters that I had been experiencing lately were actually just the thing I needed.  “Trials are but lessons that you failed to learn presented once again, so where you made a faulty choice before you now can make a better one, and thus escape all pain that what you chose before has brought to you” (T-31.VIII.3:1).

 

My initial reaction to Grumplestiltskin had been nothing more than a faulty choice on my part, and here I had been presented with, again and again, the perfect opportunities to correct this choice.  Instead of choosing the ego’s lesson of defence and attack, I could instead choose the Holy Spirit’s lesson of “in my defenselessness my safety lies” (W-1.153).  Sometimes it takes quite a few uncomfortable and painful experiences before we really are ready to come to the understanding that this is not in our best interests, and isn’t really what we want.

 

I also began to really see how my everyday job wasn’t really what I thought it was.  It wasn’t about making a living, having a successful career, or providing services to a community of people that weren’t actually out there anyway.  None of that mattered – not really.  The only purpose this, or any of my worldly roles had, was as lessons that showed me where I was choosing wrongly so I could decide to choose again.  These interactions which I thought were some of my biggest hurdles, were actually my biggest opportunities.  It just took me a while to realise it.  “In every difficulty, all distress, and each perplexity Christ calls to you and gently says, “My brother, choose again.” (T-31.VIII.3:2).  My job is simply to show up every day and to keep choosing for the truth in me, by overlooking the false in everyone else.  That’s it.

 

So, will I turn up to work next week and forgive perfectly?  Most likely not.  Sometimes I’ll get it right, and other times not.  It’s not an easy thing to just switch off the ego’s conditioning when you have been entrenched in it for so long.  It’s a work in progress.  But at least I know what it’s all for.