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Today's
Meditation:
I would be incredibly embarrassed to tell anyone how
many times I've agonized over things that I was sure were
going to happen, but never did. When I stop and
think about how much time I've wasted in my life worrying,
stressing, and trying to avoid things that never came to
be, I feel silly at best, and really, really dumb at
worst. Fortunately, though, I have learned the
lesson, even if it has been the hard way. I'm not
always able to keep up my good cheer, but I am able to
view potential calamities without a great deal of worry
and with even a little humor.
We do learn to look ahead in life and try to be aware of
things that are going to happen in the future. And
we do want to be able to do so. But this ability of
ours also gets us into a great deal of trouble at times,
for we often see terrible possibilities when in fact,
those possibilities aren't going to happen. Then we
spend our time stressed out about misfortunes that are
only in our heads.
Some of my students stress out every time they take tests,
sure that they're going to fail, and they're miserable
until they get their tests back with a passing grade on
it. Those days of misery don't help anything at all,
and in fact the students are harming themselves by putting
so much negative stress on themselves. And of
course, the failing grade never comes, so those days of
stress were completely useless.
I can deal with misfortune. I've been laid off, I've
lost friends, I've lost relatives, I've had cars die on me
on the freeway and I've had pants rip on me at
embarrassing times, I've completely run out of money in a
foreign country for two weeks. I can deal with those
things. And sometimes I get very stressed out when
they happen, and that stress actually helps me to deal
with the situations more effectively. The
misfortunes that never happen except in my mind, though,
are different, and it's very important that I not allow
them to take over my mind, but that I banish them as soon
as they appear in my thoughts.
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