(Originally posted 1st July, 2004)
Sometimes, as we travel through our own personal journies, life can throw some really curly things at us. Most of the time, they’re the sorts of things that can cause everything that you held near and dear to our hearts to come crashing down around our ears.
The vast majority of time, it’s a normal human reaction to freak out and bitch and moan and generally complain that life’s not fair and ask “why is this happening to me?”, right?
The thing is, what happens to us in our lives are the direct result of the choices that we make. Sometimes we make good choices and find our lives enriched in way that blows our minds. Sometimes we make some not so good choices and find that we get into trouble. But the thing is, what we get out of any experience — either good or bad — depends entirely on the choices that we make when we’re going through them.
Negative emotions like fear and anxiety aren’t meant to rule our lives. Instead, they’re actually there to wake us up and make us understand that the decisions that we’re making aren’t the right ones and that we need to change what we’re doing if we don’t want the end result to be bad.
But it’s like I said a while ago — an event, in an of itself, is neither good nor bad. Those values come entirely from the way that we interpret the event itself. It’s the way that humans are programmed by our genetic makeup. How we interpret the event is usually a subconscious decision, although sometimes it can be a conscious one.
I’m not saying that disengaging from the emotions you’re feeling in a particular situation isn’t easy. On the contrary, it’s often incredibly difficult when you’re caught in the middle of a situation that’s freaking you out. The trick is to realise that you’re freaking out and trying to understand why. As soon as you can do that, you can normally find another alternative, another way of looking at the event which may not be as bad as you first thought. Sometimes it’s a realisation that the changes the event is going to be bring are going to be better in the long term. Othertimes it may be that it’s just a sense of relief that a not so good situation is over and you’re actually free for the first time in a long time.
When a life change comes along, it’s best to not to deny or resist it. It’s here, and the sooner you can embrace it and move on, the easier your life is going to get. And really, an easy life is what we’re all after, right?