Today's
quotation:
The unhappiness we
experience is not so much a result of the difficulties
encountered along our journey as it is of our
misperception of how life instructs us. We may see a
failed relationship as an indictment of our self-worth
when it is really a lesson in using better judgment, in
valuing ourselves more, in expressing greater
appreciation for our partner--lessons to prepare us for a
more loving and fulfilling union. If we are passed over
for a much-anticipated promotion, it may be just the push
we need to get more training or to venture out on our own
as an entrepreneur. As we rise to meet the challenges
that are a natural part of living, we awaken to our many
undiscovered gifts, to our inner power and our purpose.
Susan
L. Taylor
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Today's
Meditation:
We
read over and over how our perception of life and what
happens to us in life is what truly affects our happiness,
the way we treat others, and our feelings of
worthiness. Many people make themselves depressed
through the way they choose to see events, and we often
see others beat themselves up over some minor incident
that to us seems trivial. In fact, many of the plots
that you'll see in television programs and movies and read
in books have to do with one person's misreading of
another person's intentions, and the characters all have
to deal with this person's flawed perception.
Susan mentions "our misperception of how life
instructs us." If we keep in mind that there's
always something important to learn in everything that
happens to us, we can approach our setbacks with much more
equanimity. A failure isn't usually that big of a
deal, especially if we see it as an important learning
experience. When we were learning addition and
subtraction many years ago, we "failed"
constantly, but when our teachers corrected us we didn't
usually see our failures as statements on us as
people. Rather, we usually just moved on and tried
to get the right answer. What kind of emotional
wrecks would we be today if we had let those small mistakes
build up into something much more than they were?
Mistakes
and failures are important, for they teach us much more
than successes do. Success just verifies that we've
completed a process in the right way--in the process
itself, we probably learned a lot from our errors.
But once we know the process and continue to do the same
thing in the same way, we no longer learn anything, and
the process becomes a rote exercise.
Today,
I'd like to try to see the lessons behind all of my
failures. I'd like to try to understand why certain
things have happened. I can do this, too, if I allow
myself to look at the setbacks in a different way, perhaps
by trying to see what happens to me through the eyes of
someone else, someone who can see my life more objectively
than I can. No matter how I see things, though, I
have to remember that my perspective is skewed and biased,
and the reality and the meaning of almost any situation is
rarely the way I see it.
Actively
searching out another way to see the events of life is
really the only way that we can discover our undiscovered
gifts and unseen purposes. The effort definitely
will be worth it--too many people of worth and character
who have come before us assure us that it will be.
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