Today's quotation:

We cannot choose the things that will happen to us.  But we can choose the attitude we will take toward anything that happens.  Success or failure depends on your attitude.

Alfred A. Montapert

Today's Meditation:

So much of life is beyond our choice and beyond our control that it makes little sense to allow so many things to upset us.  Things will happen to me today that I may not want to happen, but the most important aspect of whether or how they affect me is my attitude towards them.  How I react to what happens to me is the true determiner of the quality of my life.  What I give back to life in return for what life gives to me also shows the world the kind of character that I have.

This is a lesson that took me many years to learn.  I used to think that life had something against me, that I was somehow cursed because it was pretty much impossible for me to develop strong relationships.  When things would go wrong, I'd take it out on myself, calling myself worthless, unlovable, or any number of other things.  What I didn't realize at the time was that my reactions were helping to perpetuate the cycles that I was going through, and my attitude was making it impossible for other people to get close to me.  I had so many walls up to keep me from getting hurt that no one could break through them to help many of the past hurts to heal.

Fortunately, I was able to recognize this attitude and, more importantly, recognize the effects that it was having on me.  I was able to see that most of my failures originated with me, and while I could spend hours discussing some of the things I went through in childhood that could explain my attitude, the fact was simple:  I had to change my attitude or continue to suffer.  It took a while, but I changed it.

And that has made all the difference. 

For further thought:

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life.  It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do.  It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill.  It will make or break a company. . . a church. . . a home.  The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day.  We cannot change our past. . . we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way.  We cannot change the inevitable.  The only thing we can do is play on the one string that we have, and that is our attitude. . . . I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it.  And so it is with you. . . we are in charge of our attitudes.

unattributed

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