My Attachments, Not External Circumstances, Made Me Irritated and Annoyed

I spoke with a fellow practitioner briefly last night over the phone. In a subsequent phone call, he mentioned, "Your voice in our last conversation sounded very impatient." I was stupefied for a moment and said, "Maybe I've just had too many things to do today, so I was pretty upset."

After hanging up the phone, I recalled that in the morning, I scolded my children harshly for one of their mistakes. At the time, I think that I was very upset and annoyed. I thought to myself, "I usually have this amount of things to worry about daily. Why is my xinxing (heart and mind nature, character) this bad today?" When I calmed down and looked inward, I did indeed find several attachments.

In the past few days, I have been doing a piece of translation work. Since it involves expressions and terminologies of a certain profession, it's been very difficult and exhausting for me. On top of that, I was scheduled to complete the work in a very limited time period, so I had to work on it nights and weekends. My eyes have felt uncomfortable for days. Also, the compensation for the work did not increase since the time was limited, even though the difficulty was higher. To make it worse, my pay was actually a bit lower than before. I thought to myself, "I have so many things to do for Dafa projects. Doing translation work seems to be a slow method to make a living. I've got to find some quick way to make money..." As a result, I became more and more resistant to the translation work on hand. The work became more difficult, and my eyes hurt even more than before. I felt more tempted to give the work to others to finish. I could not however, because the allotted time was too short. My kids were being noisy, and more Dafa project work was assigned to me on short notice. I felt that the pressure was beyond what I could bear.
When the fellow practitioner said that I was "impatient," I suddenly shifted my attention from the environment to my xinxing, and started looking inward. I realized that the reason I did not want to do the translation work was out of laziness and preoccupation with my personal interests. I was thinking a lot about how much money I could make an hour, and how little I was going to get paid for the piece of work I was doing. Moreover, I had to sit in front of my computer all day long, sometimes from 7 a.m. until midnight, totalling over ten hours a day except the time spent on eating and house chores. On the superficial level, I was thinking, "I am making money too slowly. There are so many Fa rectification projects. If I could make money faster, how many more people could I save?"

Due to my feeling of resistance, the work became much more difficult and my eyes became so uncomfortable. After I realized this, I found the translation work to actually be pretty easy, and I simply needed to look some things up in my dictionary. My eyes became more comfortable, my body felt suddenly relieved, I became calm and personable to others, and I did not feel like I had so many things to do any more.
A few years ago, my family's financial situation was not good. Although I knew that everything was under Teacher's control, I could not help feeling miserable and distressed. Nowadays, I have not been having any financial problems, however, I still feel irritated and distressed for not being paid enough for my work.

Additionally, a few years ago when I had a little more belief and confidence in Teacher and the Fa, I had a little less irritation and annoyance. Now, since I have truly let go of my attachments, the irritation and annoyance have disappeared. Therefore, I have come to the conclusion that our irritation and annoyance are linked to our hearts, not the external circumstances of our lives.