With the weather being so nice at the weekend, I went for a walk with my wife along the beach. Whilst enjoying the calmness and beautiful views I felt a small knock to my leg and turned my head to see this angry woman dragging her daughter away from me, but scowling at me. She shouted at me telling me to watch where I was going and “It’s people like me, not respecting social distancing, that is causing the problems”. As you can imagine, I was mortified, I was slowly walking with my wife, in a straight line, when her daughter ran into me.
I was In total disbelief, so I asked her what the problem was and why was she shouting at me, and she went off again as loud as possible screaming at me whilst grabbing her daughter holding her tight. I mentioned that if her daughter had been looking where she was going she she wouldn’t have bumped into me. At that point the world may as well have ended “She is just a child and you are an adult” and her husband gave me a look and mumbled something!
Now, if you have ever been in this situation, you know the reaction to something like this is complex not a simple choice. My emotions were high and anger being my preferred emotion I started to boil inside, so here are my choices: Fight or flight, freeze or flock?
Do I:
- Get into a shouting match with her and her husband and, potentially a fight
- Do nothing
- Try and reason with her, calm her down
- Walk away
The shouting match was fruitless and the lady was the only one shouting and I wouldn’t have been able to match that. Doing nothing goes against the grain, I am 56 years old and do not deserve to be spoken to like that so I had to stand up for myself. As I’d already tried to reason with her, that option was not working and she was not calming down. So, after my wife said “Darren, leave it!” – I walked away, I was not going to become a Sunday side show for everyone else.
As you can imagine, our calm walk along the beach was now ruined with me muttering under my breath, venting. Dispersing my anger before it took over again. My wife listened and grabbed my arm and said “Let it go, let’s enjoy the walk”
Eventually I did and the rest of the day went well, but it was a close call.
With CV-19 putting up the stress levels for everyone, I wonder what pushed her over the edge to attack me like that. Also, from my perspective, why didn’t I just say “Sorry about that”? Maybe my stress levels are up a bit as well…..
Time to raise my personal awareness, how close am I to the edge and what do I need to do to look after my mental, emotional and physical wellbeing?
How are you? Are you looking after you?