It’s three in the morning. Bed sounds really good right about now. Last night I got home from Springfield at four in the morning, slept for four hours, and woke up early (for me) to get a massage and see the chiropractor. Then I came home, slept for a couple of hours, and went to physical therapy, since healing from the car accident is now my new hobby. This evening I ran around downtown Fort Smith, came home, and took a nap on the futon from midnight to one to try to recharge before writing. I’m not sure that it worked.

Now that we have that out of the way.

This morning my massage therapist, Gena, and I were talking about how tight my scalenes are. Scalenes are the muscles that run from your ear to your shoulder on both sides. She said one of the reasons mine were tight is because my head juts forward rather than sitting back directly over my shoulders. She suggested one way I could “gently coax” my body into the right position would be to purposefully jut my head and neck forward, and then pull them back–like a turtle–and that I could do this in the car whenever I stop at a stop light or stop sign. (Thank God for tinted windows.) “Whenever you engage or flex one set of muscles,” she said, “BY LAW the opposing muscles have to relax.”

So every time I’ve stopped at a stop sign today and tried the exercise, I’ve thought, This has to work–it’s a law.

This afternoon I did something I rarely do. I voiced my opinion on Facebook. (Hell, everyone else is doing it.) One of my friends whom I respect posted an article about being punctual and asked (SHE ASKED) what everyone thought about “being late.” Well, all the other comments were basically “I hate that shit,” “Late people are rude,” “Late people are arrogant,” or–slightly kinder but not really–“Being late is arrogant behavior.”

Okay. Maybe I’m sensitive because I’m usually right on time (which apparently is the new late) or five to ten minutes late (which apparently is “unacceptable”). I admit–this is something I could improve on. Maybe we’d all be happier if I did. I definitely think being on time is professional and courteous. That being said, I take issue with the idea that the fact that I was slightly late to physical therapy today (because I left the house with just enough time to get there and then got stuck in traffic and saw a friend in the parking lot) makes me arrogant. (Feel free to disagree.) A mediocre time manager and horrible psychic, maybe.

My therapist says that online communication is froth with misunderstandings, so I don’t want to read more into those comments than were intended. Still, I’ve been thinking tonight even if the whole world agreed that being late is arrogant or rude or “something Jesus would never do” (although Martha did say, “Lord, if only had been here [on time], my brother would not have died”), that still wouldn’t change the reality that people are late, that traffic jams do happen, that–well–shit happens.

Shit happens.

One of my creative homework assignments this week is to initiate a conversation with one of my friends about synchronicity. I’m not sure if blogging counts as a way to do that, but it’s worth a shot, so here I go. (If you have experiences you’d like share, please message me or post in the comments so this conversation won’t be one-sided.) This afternoon in the middle of my finding my fifth chakra (which is at your throat and represents confession and speaking your truth) on Facebook, I kept thinking that I needed to message my friend Vicki to see if she was going to hear her husband Donny play Irish music at Core Brewing Company tonight. Well–guess what? Synchronistically, she messaged me first (and said she was).

So later I met Vicki to hear Donny play, had a great time, and lived happily ever after.

When I started blogging tonight, I noticed that the last time I wrote about Donny, I spelled his name wrong. (Sorry, Donny. I fixed it.) But get this. Tonight when I saw Donny, he didn’t say anything about it. I mean, there wasn’t a single comment about my being arrogant or rude or a bad friend because I spelled his name incorrectly. Go figure. Maybe it didn’t bother him at all, but if it did, he chose to be gracious about it. (Thank you.)

I guess a person can always choose to be gracious.

During the course of conversation tonight, Vicki said, “The more forgiving you are of yourself, the more forgiving you are of others.” My therapist says, “You don’t treat anyone better than you treat yourself.” In other words, if you’re a hard ass with yourself–about being on time, about having good grammar and correct spelling, about being “perfect”–you’re going to be a hard ass with everyone else. (So if someone is rude, unkind, or judgmental to you–have compassion–that’s how they treat themselves on the regular.) But if you extend grace to yourself, if you give understanding to yourself, you’ll naturally extend those things to others.

I’ll say it again. You don’t treat anyone better than you treat yourself.

I’m thinking now that our judgments–of ourselves and each other–are like muscles. If we “flex” our impatience, BY LAW, our patience must relax. However, if we “flex” our patience, BY LAW, our impatience must relax. (It has to work, it’s a law.) Ultimately, we’ll never be able to control what someone else does. Sadly, at least as long as I’m in it, we’ll never be able to make the whole world be punctual. But the good news is that we have plenty–PLENTY–of opportunities to practice patience, to extend grace, to treat ourselves and those around us better.

[Here’s a picture of one of the downtown murals at night, just because I checked it out this evening and wanted to put another picture on the blog.]