The woman in the middle seat that Cutler decided he hated for no reason

Returning from a trip where he'd just attended the Dalai Lama's teachings, Howard Cutler boarded a packed flight in a cranky mood, only to discover he'd been assigned a center seat, wedged between a large man whose forearm kept spilling over the armrest and a woman he took an instant, irrational dislike to. Her voice seemed too shrill, her manner too self-important. He offered to swap seats with her husband, sitting just ahead; both wanted aisle seats, and refused. Five hours stretched out ahead of him, unbearable in advance.

He tried, seriously, the technique the Dalai Lama had described for transforming feelings toward an enemy, visualizing her as a benefactor, placed beside him specifically to teach him patience. After twenty minutes it hadn't worked at all. She still bothered him.

Then he tried something smaller. He looked at her thumbnail and asked himself, plainly, do I hate that? No, it was just a thumbnail. Her eye? Yes, oddly, he did. Her pupil? No. Her cornea? No. Piece by piece, he kept finding parts of her he didn't hate at all, only the vague, overgeneralized her that his mind had built. By the time she turned and started a conversation, the anger had already thinned out. They talked mostly small talk. By landing, she wasn't a new friend, but she'd stopped being the evil usurper of his aisle seat.

This connects to a larger claim the Dalai Lama makes about enemies specifically. Friends, he points out, rarely test your patience, because they're not trying to. Only people acting against you do that, which makes them, oddly, the only available training ground for a quality like patience or tolerance. He goes further, what makes an enemy's harm meaningful isn't just the harm itself, since a surgeon can cause real pain too, it's the intention behind it. That intention is precisely what gives you the rare chance to practice not retaliating in kind, and most people, he notes, don't actually have many real enemies. The genuine ones are scarce, which by his logic makes each encounter with one closer to a rare resource than a nuisance to endure.

Identify the one or two people who currently function as your recurring irritant, a boss, an ex, a difficult relative, and instead of treating your annoyance as proof they're simply bad, try reframing the relationship as a rare and specific opportunity to practice patience, since your friends will never ask this of you. The next time this person triggers you, break your image of them down into individual, concrete details, a specific habit, a specific phrase, a specific gesture, and check whether you actually dislike each piece, or just the blurred whole you've built in your head. Deliberately search for one genuine positive quality in them, even if it takes real effort to find, and hold onto it the next time the irritation flares. Remember that scarcity is part of the value here, this chance doesn't come around often.