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Today's
Meditation:
How
easy it is to maintain our same attitudes simply because
we've spent a lot of time developing them. But who
were our teachers? How accurate are our attitudes
towards life, and are they helping us or hurting us?
Someone who has what we call a "negative attitude"
because of things that happened early in life is going to
experience a great deal of negativity in life because that's
what he or she brings to the table; on the other hand, the
person who sees the world in positive ways is going to have
many more positive experiences because of the way he or she
looks at the world.
Our
attitudes are changeable. I used to look at setbacks
as being terrible; I now see them as learning experiences
that have something to teach me. I used to have high
expectations of others; I now realize that my expectations
tended to be a bit unrealistic, and I'm much more accepting
of others who might not have met my earlier
expectations. That doesn't mean that I let people walk
all over me--accepting people for what they are isn't a
weakness, and it's not "settling"--it's simply
realizing that I can have much more positive interactions
with them if I'm not judging them and finding them somehow
lacking.
My
attitude towards life is my choice, and if my life isn't
turning out the ways I want it to, then the best place for
me to start trying to make change is by trying to change the
attitude I bring to the world. As we grow up we tend
to develop our attitudes as responses to the world; now that
we're older, though, we can decide what attitude we want to
show to the world, and make them truly ours.
Positive
or negative? Giving or taking? Loving or
judgmental? The attitudes we choose to live with are
the attitudes that will shape the rest of our
lives--starting with this moment.
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