If you keep doing what you’ve always been doing, then you’ll keep getting what you’ve always been getting. You must courageously break the habit of your habits, or every year you will be doomed to live out: “Same #&%&!. Different Outfit.”
You decide to see…equals.
Your enemies = your teachers.
Your failure = your wisdom.
Your mistakes = your lucky discoveries.
Your conflicts = your growth opportunities.
Your undesired endings = your desirable beginnings.
Your grapes of wrath = your raisons d’etre.
Your painful feelings = your proud proof that you are dealing with your feelings—head on!
You always have a choice of emotional response to life.
Happiness is not about what happens to you, but how you choose to respond to what happens. That’s why it’s called happiness not happenness—though it could be called hope-ness. You must always leave room for hope that all has happened for good cause.
Or to quote the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: “Life may be compared to a piece of embroidery of which, during the first half of our time, we get a sight of the right side, and during the second half, of the wrong. The wrong side is not as pretty…but it is more instructive; it shows the way in which the threads have been worked together [to make the pattern].
You feel this Artsy guy’s got it pretty right. What he says reminds you of a tip your gardener friend told you…”Some plants are only meant to last for a certain season or a certain time, (said your gardener friend). If you try to make them live longer, you will be a bad gardener.”
You were struck by how the same goes for people and jobs, how sometimes it seems people and jobs—and/or problems in general—are brought into your life for certain reasons, to stay around for a certain time, to teach you certain things. Of this you are certain.
“Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float. And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on. In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.”
-Alan Watts
walnut sailboats….
Massacre of the Innocents
Bound by chain
