We possess an amazing power of interpretation.
For our minds are incredibly adept at seeing what we want to see.
We inherently possess the ability to take almost any act or event and assign it a litany of meanings based on our current feelings and/or objectives. Feeling maligned? That event will highlight it to you. Feeling loved? That glance will reinforces it for you. We truly have an amazing power.
What this means is that many events themselves are inherently meaningless. For if we can select the meaning, they are themselves undetermined.
We subconsciously (and sometimes consciously) use acts to bolster our narrative by assigning meaning to otherwise neutral events. For example, if my child is not listening to me, I begin to ascribe all her actions to willful disobedience: she leaves her backpack in the car, she slams the car door, she leaves the door to the house open. How frustrating! However, these are normal actions for a kindergartener, and in another context I would just chalk them up to her immaturity. I, not her, chose to give them meaning.
Consider that you might not be upset at someone because of x, rather you wanted to be upset with them so you selected x as the reason.
“Everything is clean to the clean-minded; nothing is clean to dirty-minded unbelievers. They leave their dirty fingerprints on every thought and act.”
Understanding this reality empowers us greatly. For if we are who decide the meaning and trajectory, then we can deliberately select the positive. We can choose how we want to see people. We can even go back and retroactively re-adjudicate situations.
Let the weight lift off your shoulders and take the extra half second in your next moment of frustration to reconsider the facts of the case. You have the power.