My insurance company is of the nature to be confusing, and other possibilities

My insurance company sent me a letter yesterday that instantly woke up my anxious angry side. 

In it, in cheery blue rows and columns, were some numbers that add up to them deciding they are not responsible to contribute any payment toward a minor medical procedure I needed recently.

Today as I thought about this, I heard in my mind some phrases I encountered in Thich Nhat Hanh's writing once, the beginning of what he called the Five Remembrances: I am of the nature to get old; I cannot escape old age. I am of the nature to get sick; I cannot escape sickness. I am of the nature to die; I cannot escape death...

And it made me think of how in Al-Anon, I have often heard and read people talking about re-tuning their expectations. For example, "I have stopped expecting an alcoholic to keep every promise." Coming to terms with reality and expecting what is probable, an alternative to being heartbroken or angered over and over by a predictable happening. Choosing to make peace when making a change is not within your power.

That type of emotionally tuned-in realism has been very hard but interesting for me to start adopting as a perspective on life. I have approached life very differently in the past, been a person who ran things into the ground out of excess will to keep them running, a person who ran herself into walls out of anger that they existed. 

Someone in a different program (AA) wrote something about this that I also return to in my mind, because it felt so true for me when I read it:

"...I hold on. I fight. I resist. It doesn't even matter what I resist; there is simply something in me that tends to resist things as they are. I have been fighting since I was very small. And I believe that my addiction was a response, in some measure, to the fact that the fight was futile, and I could not tolerate the fact that I didn't control the world. I could not, or would not learn to accept it."

- Marya Hornbacher

Waiting

So all that comes down to: tomorrow I will call my insurance.

And: today I'm turning over the possibility that my insurance company is of the nature to be confusing. My insurance company may be of the nature to make unjust decisions or mistakes. My bus is of the nature to be late. My customers are of the nature to send me emails about errors my company made with their orders. My coworkers are of the nature to make errors. 

(I imagine saying to myself, Ah, a complaint, right on schedule, instead of getting worked up.)

Expecting these things feels like turning a literal corner in my mind. It feels quite different from expecting perfection and being angry when something goes wrong. It feels like quite a relief.

"So remove your judgments whenever you wish and then there is calm - as the sailor rounding the cape finds smooth water and the welcome of a waveless bay."

- Marcus Aurelius

Meditations