I saw a post on Facebook a few days ago that said this:

Imagine this: If you had $86,400 in your account and someone stole $10 from you, would you be upset and throw all of the remaining $86,390 away in hopes of getting back at the person who took your $10? Or move on and live? Right, move on and live. See, we all have 86,400 seconds each day. Don’t let someone’s negative 10 seconds ruin the remaining 86,390. Don’t sweat the small stuff, life is bigger than that.

Ironically, I had been thinking about the same idea all week, but in a different way.

I can be quite critical of myself. If something embarrasses me or I think that I’ve done something wrong at work, for example, I have a tendency to hold onto the moment. Honestly, I am in no way effective in a situation if I’m strung up on something that happened ten minutes or four hours ago.

I do the same thing in social situations. I’m a sensitive person. I feel everything so deeply that when someone says something to me, I grab hold of it and take it as truth. I take things the wrong way or turn a small comment into a huge ordeal in my mind and then shut down. This makes social gatherings a source of anxiety for me a lot of the time. Sometimes I shut down before I get there in anticipation of something happening. And you know what? It’s not working for me anymore.

I have seriously got to learn to let things go. Like the post said, is ten seconds worth sacrificing the rest of my day? No, it’s really not. Whether it’s a mistake I make or a comment from someone else, it is not worth me shutting down. The truth is, they don’t shut me down, I shut myself down. I make a choice.

I’m ready to make a different choice.

The choice to let things go.

The choice to learn from mistakes and move on.

The choice to live in the moment.

Are you going to let ten seconds dictate the rest of your day?