Mediate or meditate?

So this morning I had a mediation hearing for a long-standing lawsuit (the second one to be exact) that my homeowner's association, of which I am the President, has pending against our insurance company. To make a long story more tolerable, we were hit by Hurricane Wilma back in 2005, and our insurance company decided that they wanted to do everything in their power to screw us over. We won our original lawsuit. Needless to say, they have asked for, and received, a mediation hearing in order to try to settle before going to court. Our attorney led us down the garden path with claims that "we have them where we want them" and that we could be awarded as much as 9x our original award. Apparently, that garden path is now overgrown with weeds. What we saw as a 7 figure settlement, they see as a 6 figure lawsuit. And all we are trying to do is recoup the monies we have paid out. In the end, we walked away, unsatisfied and dejected.

A few weeks ago, I might have been screaming obscenities and my blood pressure, almost assuredly, would have skyrocketed. But today, I was the level head. I was the one saying that this was the first step and to let the process play out, while others around me were ready to jump from the 18th story window of our meeting place. I think that this path I'm currently pursuing, unlike the false path of our attorney's claim, is what is responsible for my altered mental status today. Today was so not normal for me. Today could almost be classified as temporary insanity and yet it was probably me at my most sane. I think that that is what I am learning---that what I consider to be normal and correct is really crazy and quite wrong. Perhaps not wrong in the grand scheme of wrongs...but still wrong.

As we left the scene of the crime, I thought to myself, "rather than mediate, I should've spent the last few hours meditating". But now, several hours later, I realize that although I wasn't chanting with my eyes closed and focusing on the sensation of my breath at the tip of my nose, today's events were as enlightening as any meditation session could be.