Today's
Meditation:
Once
again, the question of perspective arises, the question of how we look
at things. This seems to be the most common thread in
all of the literature and material that I've read on living
life fully-- our world or our happiness are not necessarily
determined by what happens to us in our lives, but how we
perceive what happens to us.
Life
happens. It happens all day, every day, and there
really isn't much we can do to stop it from doing so.
With all of our interactions with other people, it's
inevitable that someone, some time, is going to do something
that hurts us in some way. Some things are going to
happen that make it seem like the world is conspiring
against us. But the important thing about this, of
course, is how we perceive the occurrences, how we see what
happens to us.
If
we take the world and its happenings with a grain of salt,
we can keep in mind that things really aren't that bad, that
everything is a matter of degree. In that perspective
lies a realistic view of the world that can allow us to take
the things that happen with a high degree of equanimity,
with a pragmatism that tells us that yes, things may be
going poorly, but life is a series of cycles, and things
always come around for the better unless we don't allow
them to do so. Many of us do, in fact, keep the better
things from happening simply because we get so caught up in
the bad things that we tend to perpetuate them in our lives,
often unconsciously.
You
don't always have control over the occurrences of your life,
but you most certainly do have control over your
perspective, over how you see things. What are you
going to do with that perspective-- train it to see the
positive side of everything, or allow it to drag you down with it
when it focuses only on the negative?
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