We’ve all done it. You know… The pity party. The ‘woe is me’. The ‘why did this happen to me?’
It’s so easy to fall into the trap on staying focused on what we don’t have, what we’ve lost or what’s happened in the past. Sometimes we make a pseudo-shift. We say that we’ve gotten over it however, we get into the ‘why’ it happened instead.
But it’s the same thing.
Trying to analyse why something happened means that we are still living in that past event. It still gives us a way to hang onto the hurt, to the self-pity or the regret.
It can be difficult to accept that circumstances, conditions and events are neutral. It is how we respond to them that demonstrates the value we place on those events – how we see them.
We see the world not as it is, but as we are. ~ Stephen R Covey
Just watch how different people respond to the same situation.
There were terrible fires in Greece recently. Scores of people perished. Homes were destroyed. There were people interviewed who could only talk about everything they had lost. Yet, given the same fires, the same destruction, and the same losses, there were other interviewees who expressed their thanks and gratitude for their lives, the lives of their loved ones and for those people who came to rescue them.
The fires happened. The losses were tragic. All the people interviewed had lost property, and more tragically, had lost loved ones. They were all grieving. Yet their responses were so incredibly different.
Why is that?
Often when things happen in our lives, we can feel completely consumed by the event and can struggle to see anything outside of the hurt and loss. But there is such incredible power in shifting out of the all-consuming hurt by lifting our heads up out of these events and to see what else it is that we do have in our lives.
This doesn’t mean we ignore what happened or that we have to try to avoid the pain of the event. It simply means that we always have the option to also recognise our blessings and what we do have in our lives, even when we are in the midst of a difficult chapter in our lives.
Life happens. We will all get to experience tragedy, loss and betrayal. But we will all also get to experience joy, expansion and incredible love and loyalty.
Life is not all good, nor is it all bad. It is simply a series of events that we get to experience throughout our life’s journey. The thing is, we are the ones who get to choose what it is that we make of those events.
We can choose to focus on the losses, the betrayals, the tragedies and the hurts. Or we can choose to focus on our blessings, the special people and moments in our lives, and the things we do have.
What will you choose?
