34.40 Managing Annoyances — F/U

77% Weekly Newsletter
Religion-Outside-The-Box

The 77% Weekly

The 40/52-weeks-a-year, spiritual-religious newsletter

A reflection on annoyances…
I am doing the exercise that I sent out on Monday — Managing Annoyances — and have two observations that I wanted to share with you.
(No, I’m not going to tell you the number of times that I get annoyed a day as that might lead to competition.)
Here are two things that I’ve found:
  1. I want to record WHY I am annoyed every time that I get annoyed.  I really want to be able to justify my irk.
  2. The simple act of taking out my note-pad to record my annoyances short-circuits my usually path of making a snarky comment.  As Victor Frankl said: Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
I hope you are trying this exercise and learning about you — after all, what is more important to learn?
Rb

Annoyance Bingo

Annoyance Bingo.Lose your patience. Win big. ✧✧✧ Game play begins Tuesday, April 21, 2026, at 12:00am PT — First Prize: $100 ✧✧✧ The Origin of Annoyance Bingo. For years, I’ve asked mourners at funerals to track the least compassionate things said in an attempt to comfort them — and send me the best (and worst) examples. The idea: when someone

Read More »
Image of a child doing a shoulder ride.

Wastefully

  Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong would answer the question “how shall we express love?” with a single word: “Wastefully.”    ✧✧✧   We don’t express love wastefully. A story and then some thinking about why.   ✧✧✧   It’s 2006. I’m in NYC to—among other things—celebrate the fifth birthday of my first niece, Maya.  I wait outside her school

Read More »

“I love you” x 3

For reasons a team of psychoanalysts might have been able to crack, my dad couldn’t get the three-word phrase “I love you” to come out of his mouth. I knew he loved us. It’s just he couldn’t say it. I rationalized that I didn’t need to hear those three words, but it hurt anyway. This is the story about how

Read More »
77% Weekly Newsletter
77% Weekly Newsletter