Following are some of the inconvenient things I did this past week: I swept the Common House and cleaned up messes other people had made; I put away dry dishes in the Mercantile that someone else had washed; I waited around for one member of the rideshare to do some errands while other members of the rideshare ate pizza; I texted back and forth to arrange a different rideshare for 20 minutes.
Christina here, writing about small annoyances and minor inconveniences in my life.
I have been thinking a lot recently about a Tik Tok I saw last week about a tweet credited to Divya Venn: “Being annoyed is the price you pay for community.”
It’s interesting because it’s totally true. I am often annoyed by people in my community. Sometimes they don’t wash their dishes, sometimes they mistakenly reply all to a group email, and sometimes they take the shared car keys. Sometimes they repeat a story more than once or talk loudly about their special interests, and sometimes they interrupt in meetings when they get excited or upset—oh wait, those three were all me.
These things can be annoying and inconvenient. But what does it mean to be annoyed? I guess that the difference for me between being annoyed and being angry is that anger is triggered by a sense of injustice or that something is wrong or hurtful. Putting away someone else’s clean dishes so I can wash my own is none of these things, but it is slightly annoying.
Here’s another thing—it’s okay to be annoyed sometimes.
I can get nervous about the future of Dancing Rabbit and worried that everyone has to love everything all the time, but that’s just impossible. Human beings are complicated and messy. And I mean, if we all walked around every day loving every single thing about each other—how annoying would that be??
There’s also that old nugget from Jung: “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” The way that I have always interpreted this is that I don’t like elements of myself that have a light shined on them when I am with other people. I think the idea is that we learn more about ourselves, not in spite of being annoyed, but precisely because we are annoyed. Being with other humans means you will be irritated from time to time, but it also means that you will learn a lot about yourself.
What would the alternative be? I guess it would be having a life that is convenient and free of annoyances. In the examples I thought of today, it would mean doing what I want when I want, not having to compromise with anyone else—in short, it would be not having other humans impact my life in any way. I would be driving by myself in my own car, not dealing with other people’s messes, and doing what I want.
And it would also be lonely, boring, and maybe even a bit meaningless at times.
Okay, don’t get me wrong, as a mom of two teens I love when I can have time to myself to do what I want or just to complete a task without interruption, but also I totally recognize that the time I spent hanging out at that pizza parlor, or waiting in line to wash my hands at potluck, or catching up with friends as we share a ride, or sweeping the Common House with other Rabbits really made up some of the highlights of my week.
It also means that if I am going to have all of these other humans in my life, I need to plan ahead for some inconveniences and annoyances. It means accepting that what could be a (short, convenient) trip to town to do one quick thing will actually take the whole morning. It means making space in my life for things to not always be as efficient and annoyance-free as possible. It means making a conscious effort to widen what I have seen referred to as my “window of tolerance.” When I am in this zone, these small inconveniences and annoyances are actually not a big deal at all and really don’t affect me much. For me, widening that window and staying inside that zone means doing things like reading a book I enjoy first thing in the morning, getting outside to walk on the land, doing yoga, and planning for fun in my life.
To be honest, though, I’ll still grumble loudly about people putting their wet dishes on top of dry dishes in the shared dish drying rack in the Mercantile. I mean seriously, how annoying, right?
Christina Lovdal Gil is a regular contributor to this newsletter, and we thank her for that! Christina and her family recently hosted a lovely pizza party, with yummy pizza cooked in their new cob plaster oven, built in part by students in a natural building workshop.