I just had the most annoying experience at the gym!
Typically, when I do cardio, I find it a good time to get work done, like killing 2 birds with 1 stone.
My favorite machine is the stepper because I put it at a moderate pace, and while I’m walking up the steps, I’ll check my emails, create content and respond back to DMs.
I have a hard time multi-tasking and can only do 1 thing at a time, so I love it when it’s quiet at the gym. It allows me to get focused and productive.
As I’m doing my cardio, I hear this guy behind me singing with the most horrible voice you could ever hear!
He’s in his own world singing his heart out totally out of tune, neglecting all of the people around him.
Dude was jumping around all over the gym, from one machine to another and singing to his heart’s content.
There was an elderly woman on a stepper looking at me shaking her head with disgust.
Even though she had headphones on,
she can probably hear this dude’s loud ass voice muffling all of the sound around us.
At this point, I felt my body tensing up.
Here I was trying to do my cardio and I’m forced to hear this guy’s horrible singing and dancing.
Before I blew up, I realized I needed to say something because he was totally disturbing everyone around him.
As I got off the stepper to tell this guy to tone it down,
I came to realize that he was not in his right state of mind.
Something was totally off…
As I got closer to him, he appeared to be severely mentally challenged.
Even though he was about 6 feet tall, well over 300 pounds and looked about 40ish,
you can tell he had the mind of a 5-year-old.
He was in his own world, passionately singing his heart out.
When I looked into his eyes, it seemed like “nobody was home”
At that very moment, as I looked into his eyes,
I felt bad for him being mentally challenged.
I don’t think he would have even understood that he was being loud and rude.
It was something that he had no control over.
From that point on, I let go of my anger and had more empathy towards his situation.
Oftentimes in life, we get so upset about the things that are happening around us.
But when we realize they are “not that serious”,
and we’re the ones who are creating the “story of being upset”,
our perception starts to change.
Wayne Dyer has a great quote. He said,
“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at Change”.
I became aware of my anger earlier, when I thought about the guy disturbing the peace at the gym.
I got angry because my expectation of peace and quiet was not met.
The fact that I couldn’t do my work was also ticking me off. Even though the gym is not an ideal work environment.
We tend to suffer when our current reality does not match our expectation.
The more we live in a state of acceptance, the easier life is.
One of the biggest mistakes we make is assuming that others think the way we think.
We expect people to see the world from our point of view and that is rarely the case.
Sometimes we have an expectation of a person and
when they don’t live up to it, we get upset with them.
Let’s say you have friend who you speak to every day,
then out of nowhere, they stop responding to your texts and phone calls.
At that moment you can think of various scenarios,
you get concerned, you get angry,
or even review the last conversation you both had and analyze it as if you did something wrong?
You can drive yourself crazy trying to figure out all the “what ifs” and none of it matters until
we speak to our friend and find out why the communication really stopped.
It’s not that our friend ruined our friendship,
it’s more so that their actions did not meet our expectation of them, and because of that, we suffer.
We often expect people to be a certain way because of our own core values.
In the same way, others have different core values and expect us to understand their needs.
When you learn to Accept rather than expect,
your whole life will change.
I could be miserable the entire time I do cardio and suffer because I expect peace and quiet.
Instead, I accepted the fact that the dude behind me is doing the best he can with his faculties
and even though his loud singing and jumping around is distracting,
it still allowed me to share this insight with you.
Out of nowhere, an elderly woman walked up to the 40-year-old singer and asked him to get off the machine.
Once he got off, she proceeded to hug him, kiss him and gave him a Snickers bar.
She saw me staring their way and when our eyes met,
we both smiled at each other.
I came to realize that she was his mother. She treated him like a toddler even though he was twice her size.
As they walked out of the cardio area, I realized that she is a true Master of Acceptance dealing with her son’s special needs for the past 40 years.
The entire experience humbled me.
It reminded me to let go of all the things that I can’t control.
AJ Mihrzad is the author of the best selling book, “The Mind Body Solution: Train your Brain for Permanent Weight Loss.”
