Slept fitfully last night, but that is not unusual.  Perhaps that was due to elevated blood sugar that I measured just before my breakfast of cheerios.  I’ve been diabetic for a while, and controlling blood sugar is like staying on a pitching rodeo bull.  I am thrown often, and I know that I will never master the bull.  At some point I will be thrown for the last time and be injured by a horn or a hoof.  The medical people know that.  They are loathe to put the matter so crassly.

I arrived at Starbucks at the usual time, 7AM.  I was disappointed to find my customary table for sitting to read and to write, taken.  For the second day in a row I am beset with the same “problem.”  I found another suitable spot of course, but not my favored place.  I felt a low level of irritation at the person who was displacing me.  I know that is irrational.  Is not emotion, every emotion illogical; an eruption that colors the mind?  Reason quickly came to the defense though.  My imagination effortlessly conjured up scenarios of the undeserving person who has taken my place.  My interpretation while I viewed them in “my space” was ungenerous. 

She is going to be there all morning….  He is just killing time, filling his mind with ephemera dredged from the internet.  She’s been here before and should know that’s my table. etc, etc.

The mind easily jumps into blame mode.  Reason is marshaled to ridiculously defend what is almost certainly nothing but coincidence.

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I read a piece from www.theschooloflife.com that so impressed me that I pasted the content into a word doc so that I could review it multiple times.  I’ll share a few lines with you, as they are relevant to the innumerable mini-failures that we experience every day.

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Maybe you’ve crashed again – you’re in a dark familiar place.

But what if, you chose a fresh approach to despair, using a strange weapon molded out of an attitude of radical melancholy and defiant vulnerability…

How on earth were you to know?
…when we possess so little of the information, about ourselves and the conditions of life, that are required for leading the unblemished life?

Why do we keep feeling surprised and angry that we fail?
What is sure none of us is ever beyond regular encounters with total stupidity.
What we need is the darkest kind of celebration:

— a politely giant fuck you to the universe
for the way we have wound up
as bits of semicoherent,
semi-conscious suffering biological matter
pinned to a spinning rock near a fading star
without a clue
of how to conduct ourselves
meaningfully.

All who recognize this
are our natural friends,
to whom we should turn
and share bleakly funny jokes
as we head to the gallows
and the ultimate catastrophe
that awaits us all.

— Alain de Botton