Is there any place more fraught with energetic landmines than the DMV?

Yesterday was a half-day at school. My daughter turned 16 seven days ago. I was out of technical reasons for saying we couldn’t go.

I felt the woman’s energy before I saw her. Imagine someone struggling to carry an overloaded laundry basket of squirming, grubby, grumbling gremlins up a flight of steep, narrow stairs. Hard for her; hard for us to witness.

I gave someone questionable advice recently. I suggested that she double down on her consideration to quit. Without a backup plan.

Any time we have to qualify a decision with “because I should,” that is our code red alert that we are not in full alignment with ourselves. We are devaluing our knowing and our self worth in that moment. We are saying to ourselves that the Others, They, the Experts, know better than we do. We are priming ourselves for a “resentful yes.”

Let me reassure you that I possess a surfeit of outrage and anxiety about the current situation but I’ve come to understand that imbibing and redistributing it on a daily basis is a DO-ing that yields nothing but more anxiety and outrage for me and has the ripple effect of stoking the fires of these feelings in others.