Every time I go to Bath, a truly beautiful city, I feel energized and uplifted. Recently, however, one morning, while I was cycling along a bridge, I passed a man who began shouting obscenities at me for no reason. He continued bellowing his cutting remarks at me after I’d passed by. It was very upsetting, to say the least. I had a day planned full of many lovely things, which did not include having unprovoked insults hurled at me.
After sitting a few minutes decompressing by the river, I steadfastly decided that I wasn’t going to let some random encounter spoil my day – or my mood. I ended up having a wonderful day, which included a tree identification walk by the river, apple scrumping, shopping, cycling by the canal and encountering very nice people everywhere else I went.
A similar incident occurred a few days later, most unusually, in my sleepy little town of Chipping Sodbury. Cycling once again along a shared path, a woman with two dogs started shouting at me. It was annoying, for sure, but I was not going to let her ruin my enjoyment of a gloriously sunny evening.
While we can actively choose to engage in higher energy activities, we can’t control who we may encounter along the way or how they might interact with us. All we can do is to control our own reactions to people, including those spouting negativity. And while such encounters are upsetting and my initial reaction would be to lash out back at the instigator, I usually find that this actually escalates the situation and makes it worse.
I’m not suggesting we just take abuse wholescale, and if I had thought in these scenarios that there was anything to be gained by interacting with either person, I would have said something, but I felt it was better just to leave them to their own inner dilemmas and walk away, shutting out the negative energy and not internalizing it or letting it ruin my day.
The way I’ve learned to do this is to take the intense emotion out of it and realize that whatever is going on with that person probably has very little to do with me and I just happened to be an available target upon which to vent.
In some ways, I feel sorry and have compassion for such people, that whatever is going on with them is causing them to interact with people in such a hostile way. It must be awful to have that in your head 24/7. I can only feel grateful that I’m not tormented that way and have the internal equanimity and rationality to get on with my life with intelligence and positivity, though it is sometimes put sorely to the test.
The best way to combat such negativity is to seek out joyful activities – anything that raises your energy and literally fills you with joy, thus dissolving the negativity and transforming it into a source which strengthens the relationship with your inner and outer worlds.