Screaming Fit

Have I mentioned how much I love my Bose noise cancelling headphones for working on plane flights?

Especially planes that have screaming toddlers.

We’re frustrated in such situations. And immensely thankful when the screaming stops.

We feel stress, anxiety, annoyance. We have something we cannot control and that has no purpose.

It is not the toddler that is screaming that is at fault.

We can argue whether it is the parents’ fault for the screaming toddler.

It takes a huge effort of will to determine that we cannot fix the problem causing us stress (the screaming toddler) so our best option is engineer a solution that mitigates the problem (good quality noise cancelling headphones). There are a lot of areas in our life where we can approach problems the same way.

Some days you just cannot fix the underlying problem. You can only create a solution that moves the problem somewhere else.