Mahatma Gandhi was known to maintain his cool, even under very trying circumstances. He had been jailed, been threatened, his character questioned, but he remained calm and unruffled. In fact when asked why he didn’t reply to some of the maligning, he said he would have to spend his entire energy and time just replying to all the criticism and he had much better things to do. Abraham Lincoln, too was also one such great man. He was known for his compassion and had to make some tough decisions in his life, especially during the Civil war. For some of his decisions he had many detractors who especially didn’t like it when he was easy going on the defeated ‘enemy’ . Abe did not let any of the disparagement get to him.

Well we may not be a Gandhi or an Abe Lincoln and have to make monumental decisions, but we definitely do have moments in our lives everyday that upset our equilibrium and then we stew and rant and rave. Sometimes these are very little things.

To give you a sampling… we wake up late, the alarm didn’t go off and we curse while we rush to get the kids ready and off to school, with the school bus horn taunting us outside. They miss the bus and we fume over the fact that we will have to drive in the full rush hour to drop them off, and are going to be late to work. Just visualizing another day of having to listen to the boss’ snide comments about disorganized lives and how women do not make good employees, makes us want to just crawl back under the sheets.

In your hurry to get the kids on time to school, you drop the cereal all over the floor and the kids talk back to you when you ask them to clean it up. You threaten them with no desserts for a week, leaving sullen faces all around. On the way to school, you are sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic, thumping on your car horn because the person in front of you doesn’t seem to be inching forward, quick enough for you. Convent walls had never looked so inviting before.

Whoaaaa…Stop and take a deep breath. Are you hyperventilating, just because your boss might have something to say to you and your kids refused to do a chore? Cut yourself some slack for the sake of your own health. Stress is one of the top causes for heart attacks and you certainly don’t want that happening to you in the middle of heavy traffic, with your kids in the car.

We do we waste our energy and so much of our lives getting upset over what are only just blips in our daily lives. As someone much wiser than us said---Every time a problem surfaces, the question we need to ask ourselves is- Will this matter in a year. Will we even remember it one year down the line? And if the answer is No, which it usually is, does it make any sense to be working ourselves up over it.

Have you seen men on the road, obsessing over someone cutting them off, overtaking them maybe in a not so fancy car? Have you seen women getting upset over someone cutting ahead of them in a supermarket or someone standing in a line that says …5 items and less, with a full grocery cart. I know I get pretty mad when I am put on hold for what seems like aeons when I am trying to register a complaint and have to keep listening to some grating elevator music, repeating itself for the 20th time.Hey I am the aggrieved party here and you are giving me more grief with your poor customer service.

When I was about 20, I read the book, Don’t sweat the Small Stuff. Even though it was so simple it had some marvelous lessons in them. I carried the book around with me for a year… and underlined some of my favourite parts-''Become More Patient. Don't Interrupt Others or Finish Their Sentences”, “Turn Your Melodrama into a Mellow-Drama” “Surrender to the fact that life isn’t always fair”

One thing I have realized as I advance in years is that one certainly does not learn much about real Life within the four walls of an educational institution or in a textbook. All the lessons doled out to you as you traverse down that road of Life and how you act in response to those lessons is what makes you the person you are. Some of the lessons have to be learned over and over again, since they are not easy ones.

We need to learn to be cool-headed and warm-hearted. We may not succeed at first…it is so much easier to fly off the handle and we tend to do when we are young. Age tends to bring with it wisdom or maybe we just become lethargic and do not have the inclination or energy to react to things which once would have us in a tizzy.

With cool heads we are able to think things through and not react in anger. With a warm heart, we tend to be forgiving, understanding, and open. And so let us make sure it is not the other way around – a hot head which makes problems worse than they are and a cold heart which is unfeeling and unforgiving.

Treasure Yourself. (As Richard Carlson, author of Don’t sweat the small stuff, would end all his correspondence).