5 easy ways to celebrate National Get Over It Day
Those of us who struggle with the long list of losses and injustices that accrue with getting older may find it helpful to observe National Get Over It Day on March 9. Here are some easy steps you can take to let go and “get over it.”
The older I get, the more distressed I become by the lack of fairness in the world. I also become worried about my own struggle to heal, recover, and regenerate from the things people do to me. In the quest to Get a Life, sometimes we forget that we need the accompanying tool, Get Over It when the life we’re chasing turns out to come with bumps in the road caused by others and sometimes ourselves. When things don’t go according to plan — whether they are your own mistakes or the myriad microaggressions and injustices foisted onto you by others, here are some simple things to do in the comfort of your own home on March 9 and beyond to celebrate National Get Over It Day.
Watch Stutz on Netflix
If you’re reading this post at all, chances are you need to make some changes in your life. Stutz is a documentary by Jonah Hill that shares with the viewer the tools he picked up in therapy with his therapist, Phil Stutz. This doco makes the top of my list because of its hypothesis that obstacles can be transformed into opportunities with a switch of thinking. The smallest action can be a tool that can change your inner state almost immediately, and give you the feeling that you can propel yourself away from a bad thought or situation.
Our linear concept of life, that it should always get better as it goes along, is a real source of misery and entrapment in unhappy states. A key tool, Stutz says, is to understand that you can take unpleasant experiences and thoughts and transform them into opportunities. Stutz says his Tools “turn problems [in]to possibilities,” and give people the propulsive feeling that they can make big changes by changing their thoughts. The first thing to do is to understand the three unavoidable Aspects of Reality: Pain, Uncertainty and Constant Work. Fun! And then to use the Tools, which you can read about here. The strongest takeaways for me came in the discussion of active love, radical acceptance, processing loss—and understanding that if I replace my expectation that life should be fair, with instead a flow of gratitude, the losses get smaller and easier to deal with.
Make a Get Over It Playlist, starting with Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off”
Sometimes when things really piss you off, intellectualizing isn’t in your bandwidth. Instead, you may need to sing and dance and jump around. And this is why we love Taylor Swift. If anyone has been on a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs and all the feelings in her short life, it’s Swift. She deals with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune by writing songs about them, and if you can’t write a song, you can certainly make your own get over it playlist. Start with Swift’s “Shake it off” and add a few others, like Sia’s “Titanium” and Katy Perry’s “Roar.”
Turn the other cheek
It’s all too easy today to seek revenge for injustices, real or perceived. Digital and social media has inflamed our sense of subjectivity and surrounded us nonstop information about al that doesn’t lineup with who we are. From terrorist attacks to mass shootings to murder-suicides: the root cause is an aggrieved and fragile perpetrator who acts out their desired retribution. It would have caused a lot less heartache and human suffering to turn the other cheek. Jesus as a prophet taught his followers to avoid revenge or “an eye for an eye” mentality and to rather practice forgiveness, compassion, and love — even with your enemies. A favorite recent example of this was the lesbians who own and run Bee’s Knees Grocery and Bakery in Nova Scotia who invited the person who repeatedly destroyed their rainbow flags to come in, meet them, sit down and have a cup of coffee.
Have faith in karma, she is a bitch
Not everyone believes in karma, the concept that your actions will in time bring you results that have a moral weight equivalent to the deed you enacted. But the truth is, most faith systems have some form of belief in karma, including the Christian sentiment of doing unto others what you would have done to you. My personal psychological belief is not in sin and redemption, tit-for-tat, comeuppance or any other Western distortion of the Sanskrit original. To me it just means actions have consequences, and so do yours. You are not always being “done to.” You, too, can “do.” You can also go one better than getting over it; you can help repair the world and leave it better than you found it rather than holding onto whatever bad thing was done to you.
Burn something. No, seriously
In days of yore, and even in some places today, making a really big bonfire and throwing something on it is a way of letting go of past deeds, misfortunes, or regrets. For example, in Reykjavik New Year’s bonfires are a tradition reaching back at least to the 18th century in Iceland, stemming from the (Viking?) belief that you can start the new year with a clean slate, especially if you symbolically burn away the old year and everything it stood for. Because we carry life’s disappointments with us, whether that is a relationship that didn’t work out, or maybe a dream or a job or an idea for a project that never came to fruition, here is something you can do to lighten your load: Light a fire in the fireplace, or outdoors in a fire pit, or even your own grill, and take something paper that symbolizes the “failure” you carry around with you and set it alight. Watch those sparks and all that smoke rise and let go with it. It’s gone and it can’t hurt you anymore.
